His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope. In conversation with Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice.
Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America, brings us an intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present.
John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.”
Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of many New York Times bestsellers, The Hope of Glory, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, and many more. Meacham, who holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville.
Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice is Dean and President of Morehouse School of Medicine.
Presented by the Book Festival of the MJCCA and the JCC Literary Consortium in partnership with the Atlanta History Center.