The John Lewis You Never Knew

 

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At one time, John Lewis exhibited a penchant for an aggressive Black activism within the civil rights movement. The “nonviolent” John Lewis once described the organization he once led (SNCC) as an organization of students who were “part domestic Peace Corps and part guerrilla warfare.” He once admitted that “[m]ore and more blacks…including myself, took the position that the black movement…had to be black-controlled, black-led, and black-dominated….The young Turks [militants] had come to feel old-line Negro groups like the NAACP and the Urban League were too bound up with white people, too close to their white money supply to have the necessary maneuverability—especially on the ballooning question of the war in Vietnam.”

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