Eugene Robinson: So Many Miles From Selma

[tannybogus]

DENVER -- "I cried on Monday when Michelle spoke," Rep. John Lewis told me Wednesday at the Pepsi Center, "and I know that on Thursday night at the stadium I'll cry again."

Lewis, as every schoolchild should know, is one of the few lions of the civil rights movement still with us. As a Freedom Rider, he was pummeled by white Alabama mobs in 1961. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he spoke alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in 1963. His pate is scarred from a brutal beating administered by Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. Lewis has earned the right to shed tears of amazement and joy.

A Democrat who represents Atlanta, Lewis fretted for months over whom to endorse in the primaries. Last October, he joined much of the black political establishment in backing Hillary Clinton -- out of a sense of loyalty and realpolitik. But as it became clear that Barack Obama might actually win the nomination, Lewis seemed increasingly agonized over the choice he had made. It wasn't just that he was catching hell from his African American constituents; nothing in John Lewis's biography suggests he even knows how to back down. Rather, he began to feel that he was on the wrong side of history.

"Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap," he said in mid-February. Two weeks later, he switched his endorsement to Obama.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/28/AR2008082802853_pf.html