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Title details for His Truth Is Marching On by Jon Meacham - Wait list

His Truth Is Marching On

John Lewis and the Power of Hope

by Jon Meacham
John Lewis
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
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An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America 
 
John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. 
 
Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change. 
This audiobook includes a PDF of the book’s Appendix.

  • Creators

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  • Awards

  • Release date

    August 25, 2020

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593347652
      • File size: 288401 KB
      • Duration: 10:00:50

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This stirring audiobook offers a memorable merging of author, subject, and narrator. JD Jackson voices John Lewis with an authentic and nuanced nod to his rural Alabama roots. He adroitly does the New England intonations of JFK and RFK and the drawls of LBJ and George Wallace. But it is the powerful retelling of John Lewis's life's work fighting to bring civil and voting rights to Black Americans that stays with the listener. Famed for overcoming the beatings he received and his many arrests for sit-ins, Lewis comes across in Meacham's crystalline prose as a man who prevailed through nonviolence and an abiding religious faith. The late congressman added a fitting afterword to this audiobook. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 7, 2020
      A profile in courage and faith under fire emerges from this vivid portrait of Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis (1940–2020). Meacham (The Hope of Glory) focuses on Lewis’s experiences during the late 1950s and ’60s as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a leader in crucial civil rights actions. It’s an epic story in Meacham’s impassioned telling: arrested and beaten many times, Lewis was knocked unconscious by a white mob in Montgomery, Ala., during the Freedom Rides, and had his skull fractured during the 1965 Bloody Sunday march in Selma, where, “trapped between asphalt and his uniformed attackers, inhaling tear gas and reeling from the billy club blow to his head, felt everything dimming.” Meacham also probes the nonviolent protest philosophy Lewis learned from Martin Luther King Jr. and others, exploring its Christian intellectual roots, its practical discipline—training sessions featured mock racist attacks—and Lewis’s lonely adherence to nonviolence and integrationism after the SNCC gravitated to Black Power militance. Meacham sometimes goes overboard in his adulation, declaring Lewis a “saint” who “seemed to walk with Jesus Himself” and was “in the world, but not really of it.” Still, this gripping work is deeply relevant to America’s current turmoil over racial injustice.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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