When John Lewis, the last of the great figures of the Civil Rights era, died at age 80 in 2020, Americans reflected with near-universal admiration on a life well lived. And, thanks to Lewis himself, they knew of the pivotal role that Buffalo played in molding this national icon.
What a life John Lewis lived. Despite growing up poor as one of 10 children of sharecropper parents on a farm near Troy, Alabama, Lewis was a good enough student to get into a Baptist seminary in Nashville. In his early 20s he protested against segregation in the Jim Crow South by organizing sit-ins, lunch-counter protests and dangerous Freedom Rides on interstate buses. He was a founding member and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the main conduit of the Civil Rights movement on college campuses, and, as leader of SNCC, was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, where he was the youngest speaker to address the crowd of 250,000 that filled the Mall.
Like his Civil Rights movement colleague Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis was an ordained minister who spoke often of the need for get into “good trouble, necessary trouble” to bring about justice. Indeed, he’d been arrested more than two dozen times by 1965, when he led a march for full voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. As Lewis and his fellow marchers stopped to kneel in prayer, they were set upon by the Alabama State Police; Lewis’s skull was fractured by a police nightstick.
Lewis went on to work in the Carter Administration as head of a series of volunteer anti-poverty programs, later serving as an Atlanta city councilman and, from 1987 until his death, as a congressman representing Georgia in the House of Representatives.
But how did Buffalo play such an important role of a man whose life was so deeply intertwined with the South?
Lewis told the story in his autobiographies, “Walking With the Wind” (1998) and “March” (2013). In both, he recounted a transformative summer vacation he spent in Buffalo in 1951, when he was 11. Lewis wrote of an uncle who drove him north, through Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, wary of the potential violence they’d suffer if they stopped at a gas station or restaurant where blacks were not welcome, on into Ohio and Pennsylvania, where they felt relief at finally being free of the enforced segregation of the South. Finally, they reached Buffalo, where young John Lewis would spend about a month with two more uncles and their wives.
The 11-year-old Lewis encountered a vastly different city than the Buffalo of today. Young Lewis was gobsmacked by the crowded and bustling downtown, filled with cars and pedestrians hurrying to and fro (“It was so busy, almost frantic, the avenues filled with cars, the sidewalks crowded with people, black and white alike, mixing together as if it was the most natural thing in the world.”). But what really impressed him about the Buffalo of 1951 was the fact that blacks and whites existed alongside one another: “When I went to Buffalo, I saw black people and white people living side by side, eating in the restaurants and lunch counters in the department stores,” Lewis later recalled. “So that was an education for me.”
Indeed, Lewis was amazed that his uncles’ neighbors on North Division Street were white---“on both sides,” as he put it. Rep. Brian Higgins, who served in Congress alongside Lewis, wrote: “When John arrived in Buffalo, he saw for the first time black and white children playing in unison in the Parade, now Martin Luther King Jr. Park. He saw white and black women drinking from the same water fountains, and he saw his uncles working alongside white men in the steel and flour mills of Buffalo…. John stated in his autobiography that what he experienced in Buffalo convinced him that desegregation of the South was possible.”
Or, as Lewis himself wrote: “After that trip, home never felt the same. And neither did I.” *
How fortunate we are that Lewis came to Buffalo during that brief period when it truly was an integrated place. The Second Great Migration of black Americans from the rural South to the industrial North was still happening, swelling the city’s population to 600,000. In the Buffalo of 1951, white families on the East Side did not yet automatically flee to the suburbs at the prospect of a black family moving in nearby. That phenomenon would become glaringly obvious just five years later, around the time of the infamous racial incident aboard the Crystal Beach excursion boat Canadiana and, soon after, with the building of the Kensington Expressway.
If Young John Lewis arrived in Buffalo just 5 or 10 years later, he’d have encountered a much different Buffalo… a city that became one of the most segregated places in America (which it remains today). Would Lewis have been inspired to spend his life fighting segregation and racial prejudice if he’d visited the Buffalo of the late ’50s rather than the Buffalo of the early ’50s?
We can never know. But perhaps it’s better to be thankful that Lewis arrived in Buffalo at a sweet spot in its history, when it was a thriving city where whites and blacks lived happily, side by side---the kind of place that could inspire a young boy to become a great man who’d spend his life fighting for justice.
* Sean Kirst of the Buffalo News tracked down Lewis’s Buffalo relatives in this remarkable 2022 article, “Deep family ties to John Lewis remain in Buffalo, a city that changed his life”.
PRODUCTION NOTE: The role of the elder John Lewis in this dramatization is played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, the Amherst-based character actor best known for portraying roles in the plays of August Wilson (e.g., “Fences,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom“) on stage and screen, and who currently appears in the Netflix series “A Man on the Inside.”
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Cast (in order of appearance):
Narrator: Susan Banks
Elder John Lewis: Stephen McKinley Henderson
Young John Lewis: Jerome Dixon
Sound recording: Brandon Nightingale
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer
The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-Aftra) for its assistance in enabling the appearance of Mr. Henderson.
Council Member Mitchell P. Nowakowski and the City of Buffalo for their generous support.