HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON

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 presentfrom the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Soul of America

His story is well-documented. His legacy is cemented in American history. U.S. Representative John Robert Lewis is the embodiment of a survivor, an activist, and an optimist. While many are finally waking up to the ills of racial injustice, John Lewis was a pioneer in search for such justice fifty-five years earlier, in March 1965, when he made the decision to protest the exclusion of African-Americans from the voting booth - a violation to the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution.

What the images of George Floyd losing his life on the ground at the hands of police in Minneapolis, MN a few weeks ago, is doing for the BlackLivesMatter movement right now, is what the images of John Lewis, at age 25, being beaten and left for dead on the pavement, at the hands of police, in Selma, Alabama in March 1965 did for the passage of federal legislation guaranteeing voting rights. Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and critically-acclaimed historian, Jon Meacham, delivers an intimate and inspiring portrait of the civil right hero, linking his life to the search for justice in America from the 1950's to the present. After all, it was only this past March 2020 when Rep. Lewis stood, once again, at the foot of the draw bridge in Selma, not just to reenact "Bloody Sunday", the description used for that fateful day in 1965, but to urge present-day marchers to reclaim the soul of America by voting.

Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and a 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." A believer in hope above all else, Lewis learned from a young age 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 ithis first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in Godand an unshakable belief in the power of hope.

Meacham states that Lewis is "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the nation-state in the eighteenth century. He risked limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerfulnot in spite of America, but because of America, and not in spite of religion, but because of religion." What John Lewis has done is offer Americans a blueprint for social and political change.

Jon Meacham is a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor of Time magazine, he is the author of the New York Times bestsellers,The Soul of America, The Hope of Glory, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston. Meacham, who holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, lives in Nashville.