David Greenberg’s new book, John Lewis: A Life, is a well-researched, engaging, and revealing biography of the civil rights leader and congressman. Lewis represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives for 33 years, from 1987 until his death in July 2020.

Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University and a contributing editor to Politico, has written the second complete biography on Lewis. Earlier this year, historian Raymond Arsenault published the first, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community. Both books provide excellent and similar coverage of Lewis’s life as a civil rights leader. Indeed, the first two chapters in the books share titles. However, Greenberg’s treatment of Lewis’s time in Congress provides a deeper and clearer understanding of Lewis as a member of the House of Representatives.

Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, into poverty in rural Pike County in southeast Alabama; his parents eked out a living by farming. One of ten children, Lewis inherited a strong religious devotion from his mother. When Lewis and his family visited Troy, the county seat, to shop, racial segregation reminded him of their second-class status under the South’s Jim Crow laws. All that he had learned from the Bible told him that treating people differently because of their race was wrong. Lewis was moved by the brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black Chicago boy, in Mississippi. A year later, he was forever changed when he heard the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. preaching on the radio and read newspaper accounts of the successful bus boycott against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama that King had led.

In 1957, at age 17, Lewis left for Nashville to study at the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Although Lewis decided to pursue the ministry, his true calling would be the civil rights movement. In 1959, he met James Lawson, a Black student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, who led workshops in the basement of a Black Nashville church on Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest and on building interracial cooperation for Black civil rights, an approach used by Lewis’s hero, Martin Luther King. By 1960, Lewis was the leader of a group of Black college students who used sit-ins and other nonviolent tactics that eventually led to the desegregation of downtown Nashville’s stores and restaurants. In April 1960, Black college students from across the South and eastern United States met in Raleigh, North Carolina, and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lewis and the other Nashville students were devoted to nonviolent protest as a strategy and philosophy for breaking racial injustice, whereas only a fraction of the students who formed SNCC were true believers. Nevertheless, SNCC became a powerful vehicle for mobilizing young people around civil rights. In 1961, Lewis and other SNCC members participated in the Freedom Rides; Lewis was beaten bloody and unconscious by a ferocious white mob. In August 1963, Lewis, as SNCC chair, was the youngest of the principal leaders who spoke at the March on Washington.

By the time Lewis had his skull fractured by Alabama state troopers on March 7, 1965 (“Bloody Sunday”), as he and more than 500 Black Americans attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to protest violations of Black voting and civil rights, the 25-year-old was already well known among the country’s civil rights leaders. Dr. King considered him a true believer in nonviolent protest and had recruited him to join the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lewis’s devotion to King caused tension between Lewis and some of the more radical members of SNCC, many of whom never fully embraced King’s approach. After King’s assassination in 1968, Lewis saw himself as the main steward of King’s philosophy. His firm commitment to it led the editors of Time magazine in 1975 to praise Lewis alongside Mother Teresa as one of the “saints among us.”

Greenberg’s biography would have benefited from a detailed explanation of how Lewis’s political ideology, practice, and effectiveness compared with other Black leadership styles. Arsenault’s book is helpful in this regard. In a cogently written introduction, Arsenault establishes that Lewis was driven by a firm belief that the United States could become a nation of equity and social justice—what Dr. King called the “Beloved Community.” Arsenault makes clear right away that Lewis’s commitment to racial equity was unshakable. He eschewed race-based ideologies such as Black Power, causing some Black leaders to question his commitment to the Black community. This conceptual thread guides the reader through Arsenault’s account of Lewis’s life as a civil rights leader and congressman.

Greenberg does not provide such a theoretical or conceptual roadmap. But the reader nevertheless comes away appreciating his description of Lewis’s lifelong commitment to interracial democracy, social justice, and racial inclusivity. For example, Greenberg describes in gripping detail how in the summer of 1966, Black nationalists concerned by the role of whites in SNCC revolted against Lewis’s leadership and his universalist approach. Black militant Stokely Carmichael replaced Lewis as SNCC chair, signaling the end of nonviolence and racial integration as cornerstones of SNCC’s philosophy.

As a good biographer, Greenberg also provides insight into the personal and inner Lewis. We learn that by the time Lewis was brutally beaten in Selma, he no longer feared death. The fight for freedom was worth dying for. Nevertheless, throughout his life Lewis was a gentle soul—modest, decent, loyal, and kindhearted. He was also self-aware. He knew his strengths and acknowledged his weaknesses. He never pretended to be someone he was not.

The second part of Greenberg’s book covers Lewis’s life after the civil rights movement, from 1969 until his death in 2020. Beginning in the fall of 1966, after leaving SNCC, Lewis worked for over a year in New York City as a foundation program officer. He quickly concluded that the city was too big and busy, and shortly after became actively involved with Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. He then moved on to what was, in my view, his most consequential work after the civil rights movement: registering Black voters in the South as executive director of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project (VEP) from 1970 to 1977.

Five years after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, resistance to Black voter registration remained strong in the South. Under Lewis, the VEP established and funded voter registration campaigns across the region, monitored and reported on voting rights violations, provided testimony before Congress on renewing the Voting Rights Act, and funded training programs for newly elected Black officials. Lewis traveled throughout the South encouraging and facilitating Black voter registration. He went on voter mobilization tours with his best friend and former SNCC colleague Julian Bond, who in 1965 had won election to the Georgia House of Representatives and would later serve in the Georgia Senate. Lewis and Bond appeared on local and national news shows together and spoke at mass rallies about Black voter registration and the power of the vote. Before Lewis left the VEP, the number of registered Black voters in the South increased by 1.5 million, to four million. The number of Black elected officials in the South also rose significantly. Although the Voting Rights Act played a tremendous role, Lewis and the VEP also deserve credit.

By the 1970s, Black politics had begun the shift from protest to elections and campaigns. What political scientists called the “new Black politics” was taking shape across the nation as Black candidates won election as mayors, city councilors, state legislators, members of Congress, and more. Working for the VEP, Lewis met important Southern politicians like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and began to think about running himself. The idea of holding public office appealed to his spirit of public service.

In spring 1977, he ran unsuccessfully in a special election to fill a vacant Atlanta-area congressional seat. Lewis then quicky joined the Carter Administration in Washington, landing an appointment as an associate director of the federal volunteer agency called ACTION, which oversaw the Peace Corps and a number of domestic volunteer service programs. The appointment required Senate confirmation. Lewis, who had gained valuable experience working with members of Congress, sailed right through.

In 1981, Lewis was elected to an at-large seat on the Atlanta City Council. As a council member, Lewis held true to his campaign promise to uphold high ethical standards. He called out politicians he claimed were too cozy with Atlanta’s developers and business groups, irritating many of his colleagues for what they perceived to be his excessive moralism. Black voters, however, supported Lewis. He also built relationships with Atlanta’s Jewish leaders, became a strong ally of the city’s gay community, and earned plaudits from neighborhood groups, historic preservationists, and environmental justice organizations.

Greenberg’s account of the 1986 congressional race between Lewis and Julian Bond is riveting. The best friends faced off with five other candidates in the Democratic primary for an open Atlanta-area congressional seat. Lewis and Bond were vastly different: Bond, the son of a college president, was slender, light-skinned, and refined, while Lewis was pudgy, balding, and often stumbled when speaking.

Much of the city’s Black political elite backed Bond. The civil rights leaders Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King publicly remained neutral, but they expected Bond to win. Atlanta’s Black elite believed Bond would provide a better image of Black leadership than Lewis. “The class snobbery was unmistakable,” Greenberg writes. In fact, almost no one believed Lewis could win. However, since his time as SNCC chair, Lewis had had endless energy. He worked hard and stopped to talk to everyone. Writes Greenberg: “Lewis’s uninflated sense of self allowed him to interact easily with people from all walks of life. He felt comfortable with everyone.” Voters embraced his personal story of growing up poor.

Bond could appear arrogant and conceited. His celebrity status also made him overconfident and an inconsistent campaigner. On primary day, Lewis’s hard work launched him into second place with 35 percent of the vote, enough to keep Bond under 50 percent and require a runoff election under Georgia law. It was the white precincts in northern Atlanta that swung heavily for Lewis and prevented Bond from winning outright.

When Bond challenged Lewis to a series of debates, he jumped at the opportunity. With Lewis behind, and with few genuine policy differences between the two, Lewis’s advisers pressed him to pivot to negative attacks. Rumors swirled about Bond’s alleged illegal drug use, and Lewis’s aides pressured him to bring it up during the debates. Lewis, whom Greenberg describes as having an “unmistakable gentleness,” refused. Initially, Lewis was only mildly critical of Bond, calling him lazy and implying that he was more interested in his celebrity image than being a legislator. However, during one debate, Bond said that by running for Congress, Lewis was breaking an earlier campaign promise to complete his second term in the city council. Lewis was irate and responded by challenging Bond to join him in taking a drug test. Bond refused, and then said that drugs weren’t a major problem in Atlanta—a claim Lewis challenged and Bond immediately denied making, drawing laughs from the audience.

Bond was damaged, but he was still expected to win. As the election returns were coming in, the news seemed bad for Lewis. He overperformed in many of the Black precincts, winning 40 percent of the Black vote, but everyone still thought Lewis had lost until a sudden surge in late returns from the white north side of Atlanta flipped the results. White voters went for Lewis four to one. He won. Years later, Lewis said he regretted raising his friend’s drug use, acknowledging that it was a “low blow.” When Bond died in 2015, Lewis suggested to others that they had reconciled. But Greenberg points out that was not true: Lewis and Bond never repaired their long friendship.

Greenberg’s coverage of Lewis’s years as a member of the House of Representatives is much more detailed and comprehensive than that provided in the Arsenault biography. Greenberg’s book benefited from over 200 interviews with family, staff members, congressional colleagues in the House and Senate, and other national political leaders, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Arsenault conducted many interviews, but he appears to have spoken with fewer people who worked with Lewis after he was elected to Congress. As a result, Greenberg’s account of Lewis in Congress is much more authoritative.

Lewis was not a legislative giant in the traditional sense. But he was interested in the preservation of Black history, and it will probably be news to most readers that he was the major House sponsor of the bill that created the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He also paid attention to his district, bringing home federal dollars for transportation and other local needs. As a result, voters sent him back to Congress again and again, even though he had little interest in policymaking. “He’s not much of a legislator,” colleagues and staff members consistently reported. House leaders had to twist Lewis’s arm to get him to agree to join the Ways and Means Committee, one of the most influential committees in Congress. In 1998, encouraged by his wife, Lewis made a halfhearted run for party whip before withdrawing from the race two years later.

Greenberg explains that Lewis worried that becoming a legislative leader would change how history remembered him. Consequently, he built his congressional career around his saintly image. “He found that the moral authority that he had accrued from his civil rights years played extremely well in Washington and with the media, especially when the subject was race,” Greenberg writes. “His experience compelled people to listen when he spoke to the core principles at stake in a policy debate.”

Democratic Party leaders saw the value of Lewis’s moral authority and used it to advance their agenda. In 1992 and 2006, when provisions of the Voting Rights Act were set to expire, Lewis was a vocal advocate and successfully rallied his fellow lawmakers to support its extension. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Lewis to testify in 1991 in opposition to Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, and again in 2005 against John Roberts’s nomination to become chief justice. When Democrats caucused shortly before a crucial vote on the Affordable Care Act in 2010, caucus chair John Larson called on Lewis to “fire everybody up” with a stirring speech at the end of the meeting. It was typical of his role. It is why, Greenberg writes, Lewis was considered the “conscience of the Congress.”

Throughout his time as a civil rights activist and then a congressman, Lewis was guided by what Greenberg describes as a “long-held vision of a racially integrated beloved community.” Greenberg reveals the agonizing political pressures Lewis faced as other Black people around him held firmly to Black Power, linked-fate, and other race-based ideologies while he stuck to his fundamental belief in equal treatment for all races. Lewis’s universalist beliefs had long led other Black people to question his commitment to the Black community. He left SNCC in 1966 because its new leadership had begun using the rhetoric of Black Power; he told The Washington Post in 1990 that he hoped the Democratic Party would “get to the point so we can forget about race and color,” removing the need for the Black Caucus. In 1984, many Black leaders and Black voters (including most Black people in his district) supported Jesse Jackson in the Democratic presidential primaries. Lewis backed Walter Mondale, the eventual nominee.

Then, in 2008, Lewis agonized over what to do after he initially supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President, only to see the Black candidate gain momentum after a stunning victory in the Iowa caucus. Lewis and the Clintons were close. Lewis did not want to abandon his white friend, who he thought had more experience and was better qualified, just because there was a Black candidate in the race. “I’ve always preached biracial politics. That’s what the civil rights movement was all about,” he told reporters. Black voters called his office, pressuring him to switch his endorsement. He resisted. When a younger Black candidate challenged Lewis in the Democratic primary, he made the difficult decision to change his endorsement. “I wanted to be on the right side of history, and that’s why I made that change,” he later explained.

Greenberg does not render a judgment on Lewis’s decision to switch his endorsement. However, he reports that Bill and Hillary Clinton valued Lewis’s friendship and understood the political pressure he was under, especially as Obama continued to win in predominantly Black districts. Moreover, by the time of Lewis’s endorsement, Obama was already on his way to winning the nomination. Politically, switching to Obama was the smart thing to do.

Lewis campaigned for Obama, but he never became an insider in the campaign. Obama’s people felt that he had come over to their side only when he had no choice. But Obama publicly embraced Lewis as a national hero. On Inauguration Day, Lewis had a seat on the stage. After the swearing-in ceremony, Lewis handed Obama a photograph to sign. Obama wrote, “Because of you, John.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, when anti-Black violence was common, Lewis put his life on the line to support Black voting and civil rights. As President Obama suggested, it was in part because of Lewis that America moved closer to the interracial democracy that Dr. King and other brave and courageous civil rights leaders fought and died for. Greenberg’s biography leaves no doubt that John Lewis was an American hero who helped save American democracy.