Remembering John Lewis (1940-2020)

In July, John Lewis passed away after a remarkable life dedicated to American democracy and racial equality. We mourn his death, but will always remember his courage and leadership.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is fortunate to own two photographs that picture John Lewis by the celebrated photographer Danny Lyon (American, born 1942). We have selected one of them as this month’s “Object of the Month.”

In this photograph taken in Cairo, Illinois, in the summer of 1962, the twenty-two year old Lewis kneels in prayer, second from left, alongside other young demonstrators. Then a student at Fisk University in Nashville, Lewis—together with other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—traveled to several cities in southern Illinois that summer to protest racial segregation. Lewis had been beaten by white mobs and arrested by police the previous summer as one of the original thirteen Freedom Riders during their efforts to desegregate interstate busing. In Cairo, Lewis and others were again met with violence.

Also in Cairo was another college student, Danny Lyon, then a rising senior at the University of Chicago. Lyon was interested in photography and the burgeoning civil rights movement. That summer he decided to hitchhike from his home in New York City to document SNCC protests in Illinois. Lyon later recalled his time in Cairo: “There was no press, no film cameras, no police, and no reporters,” he explained with surprise. “At Cairo's only, and segregated, swimming pool, the group stopped to pray. Then they stood in the street singing until a blue pickup truck drove down the center of the street straight at them. A game of chicken ensued as the truck slowed and the demonstrators moved out of the way, except for one defiant thirteen-year-old girl, who stood her ground until the truck knocked her down.”

This photograph was taken at the swimming pool before this attack. It makes visible SNCC’s commitment to faith and nonviolent protest to overcome violence and inequality. Shortly thereafter, SNCC’s leadership recognized the power of Lyon’s photograph, and asked to use it for publicity. In 1963, the organization used a cropped version of the photograph on a poster with the tagline, “Come Let Us Build a New World Together.” Lyon’s photograph and the related poster are two of the most iconic and uplifting images from this period in American history. Their emphasis on figuring demonstrations in public space and on humanizing the lives of the protestors greatly influenced documentary photographers and other artists of this era and later.

The moment that Lyon captured at a swimming pool in Cairo also provides an important historical precedence for more recent activist gestures. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision in 2016 to kneel in prayer during the national anthem as a protest against police brutality and systemic racism recalls the decision by Lewis and others to kneel in the face of racial injustice. Today many athletes and others find inspiration in the actions of both men.

Lewis and Lyon became friends in Cairo, and both continued their work on behalf of SNCC and the civil rights movement. Lewis became SNCC’s chairman in 1963 before eventually being elected in 1986 as a member of the U.S. Congress from Georgia. Lyon worked as a staff photographer for SNCC for several years before embarking on a wider career as a photographer and filmmaker.

During Lyon’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, Lewis and Lyon met again to remember their time together fifty years earlier. Lewis told Lyon: “You made a major contribution to the civil-rights movement … You made it plain, you made it real. These photographs have been shared with people all around the world, and they’ve been moved and inspired to do something.”