Congressman John Lewis

HUNTLEY: This is an interview with Congressman John Lewis for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's Oral History Project.

I'm Dr. Horace Huntley; today's date is November 19, 2005.

Thank you congressman for sitting in with us and welcome to Birmingham.

LEWIS: Well thank you very much; I'm delighted and very happy to be here in Birmingham.

HUNTLEY: Thank you; it's really an honor to able to just sit with you today. Just let me talk just briefly, I'll ask you briefly about your-you were born in Alabama, is that correct?

LEWIS: I was born in Alabama, about 10 miles outside of Troy. Troy is between Tuskegee and Montgomery. I grew up there on a farm.

HUNTLEY: And how many children?

LEWIS: I had six brothers and three sisters. A lot of first cousins, my mother had eight brothers and one sister, they had a lot of children and so it was like a very large extended family.

HUNTLEY: What about the education of your parents?

LEWIS: My mother attended public schools in rural Pike County, Alabama and she went to the eight grades and my father went to the sixth grade.

HUNTLEY: And what kind of work did they do?

LEWIS: They had been sharecroppers. My mother and father had been sharecroppers on the same land that my great grandfather lived on and my grandfather. But back in 1944, when I was four years old, and I do remember when I was four my father had saved $300 and with the $300 he bought 110 acres of land and I remember when 00:02:00we moved from this farm to the land that my father had bought he had an old broken down car and in the back seat of the car was an old radio that operated on batteries and a dog named Riley. And I was in the back seat.

HUNTLEY: It wasn't Governor Riley (jokingly)?

LEWIS: Well there's a lady-- there was a Governor Riley.

HUNTLEY: That background, how did you happen to get to Fisk University?

LEWIS: Well, as I was growing up, I kept hearing people say, "Get an education, and get an education, so you won't t have to work so hard like we're doing." And I wanted to get an education and I had wonderful teachers in these schools.

The elementary school was a short distance from my house where we could walk down the hill and make it to the elementary school, but the middle school was seven miles away and we went on a bus, bus pass a white school and then the high school was located in a little town called Brundidge, it was called Pike County Training School, during those days in Alabama, many of the rural county high schools were called training schools and the white schools were called just high school.

And I had this wonderful teacher who was from Montgomery and she would tell me, read my child, read, read everything and I read everything I could. And then in 1955, I heard about Rosa Parks, heard about Dr. King, I heard Dr. King's voice over a little radio. And my first desire was to go to Morehouse, because Dr. King had attended Morehouse. So, when I finished high school in May of 1957, I 00:04:00sent an application to Troy State, I didn't tell my mother, didn't tell my father, any of my teachers.

I had my transcripts sent down and I never heard a word from the school, so I wrote a letter to Dr. King and Dr. King invited me to come to Montgomery to see him but in the meantime, I had been accept at a little college in Nashville called American Baptist Theological Seminary. It was a college of the Bible, so I went off to there for four years and after being there, I continued to study and I got involved in the Civil Rights Movement and from being in Nashville, then I went to Fisk for two years and studied philosophy and religion.

HUNTLEY: At what point did you start, did you get actively involved with the movement while you were in Nashville?

LEWIS: Well, it was in, I met Dr. King March of 1958 when I was eighteen years 00:05:00old. He had invited me to come to Montgomery to see him, when I was home for spring break, I went up by Greyhound bus from Troy to Montgomery and arrived at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Montgomery. Fred Gray was the lawyer for Rosa Parks, for Dr. King in the Montgomery Movement.

We met at the Greyhound bus station and drove me to the First Baptist Church on Ripley Street, pastored by the Rev. Abernathy, and ushered me into the offices of the church, I guess the pastor's study and I saw Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy standing behind a desk. I was so scared; I didn't know what to say or what to do. And Dr. King spoke up and said, "Oh you're the boy from Troy, are you John Lewis?" And I said, "Dr. King, I'm John Robert Lewis." I gave him my whole name.

And that was the beginning of my relationship with Dr. King. And so I went back to Nashville and continued to study there and it was there that I first heard 00:06:00Rosa Parks. She would come and tell the story of the movement. Thurgood Marshall would come, Daisy Bates, Mrs. King would come and speak and we hear these folks coming to Nashville, Coretta Scott King would come and tell the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott through songs and they were so inspiring and I wanted to find a way, I went to a little church, called the First Baptist Church in downtown Nashville pastored by the Rev. Kelley Miller Smith, who was a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. they both had gone to Morehouse. Kelley Miller Smith was from Mt. Bayou, MS; he was one of the great ministers, He couldn't really preach and just tell a story and many of the lawyers and doctors and professors from Fisk and Meharry Medical School in Tennessee State attended this church.

And so one Sunday morning I was there, Kelley Miller Smith announced from the pulpit that a young minister by the name of James Lawson, Jim Lawson, will be conducting nonviolent workshop and the people were welcomed to come. And I started attending these nonviolent workshops at a little church near Fisk University campus, every Tuesday night a group of students from Fisk University, Meharry medical school, American Baptist, Tennessee State and Vanderbilt started studying the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. We studied the great religions of the world. We studied what Martin Luther King, Jr. was all about in Montgomery.

We studied the role in civil disobedience, what Gandhi attempted to do in South Africa, what he had accomplished in India. And we had what we called test sit-ins. In November and December 1959, before the sit ins started in 00:08:00Greensboro, NC, we had tested this, a group of Black and white students would go downtown to those large department stores and try to be served and we were told that blacks and whites could not be served together.

HUNTLEY: Was Diane Nash apart of that group?

LEWIS: Diane Nash, Marion Barry, Bernard Lafayette and several other young people and we just went there to establish a fight that we couldn't be served and we continued the nonviolent workshops and after we came back from the Christmas holidays, we had planned to start sitting in on a regular basis. And the sit-ins started on Feb. 1 in Greensboro, NC and a young minister there called Jim Lawson and said "what can the students in Nashville do to be supportive of the students in North Carolina. "

And these two young Methodist ministers knew each other and Jim told them what 00:09:00we've been conducting these nonviolent workshop, we had test sit-ins and we're ready to start sitting in and we started sitting in on a regular basis in Nashville by the hundreds, five and six hundred students would come down, especially what we called t-days, Tuesday and Thursday, lack class days on' Saturday. And we would hear from time to time, five hundred or a

thousand students together at a church to go downtown to sit in. And when we sit in there in an orderly peaceful nonviolent fashion, waiting to be served and someone would come up and spit on us, put a lighted cigarette out in our hair or down our backs, pull us off the lunch counter stool and beat us and the Nashville sit-in movement became the first place where there was a mass arrest on February 27th 1960, 89 of us were arrested and taken to jail.

HUNTLEY: Nashville then of course was in the forefront of the sit-in movement?

LEWIS: Well it was because I think of the leadership of Jim Lawson and Kelley Miller Smith. And Dr. King would come there to speak to inspire, and encourage people and he would say things like the Nashville student movement is the most disciplined, the most organized, has a deep understanding of the philosophy in nonviolence that was very inspiring to us. He would come to Fisk University and speak in the gym and there would just hundreds and thousands of people trying to get in. And so we sort of reconnected and I stayed in touch with him during that period.

HUNTLEY: Were you involved with the initial meeting where SNCC was organized and at Shaw?

LEWIS: In Raleigh, North Carolina, Easter weekend April 1960. I didn't go to 00:11:00Raleigh, but a group of delegation from Nashville included Diane Nash, James Bevill and Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry, because it was at that meeting at Shaw University that Easter weekend that Marion was elected the temporary chair of the temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and then October of the same year, this group, a similar met on the Atlanta University campus or at Morehouse campus, in Atlanta and SNCC became a permanent organization and I was at that meeting.

HUNTLEY: Now SNCC went in Mississippi and how was then called SNCC the new abolitionist in dealing with whole question of voter registration, can you just talk just a bit about that?

LEWIS: Well in 1961, after the freedom rides, SNCC went into Mississippi. it was very dangerous, and it was like putting your life on the line, For many of us. We went into Mississippi in May of 1961, my first trip to Mississippi, growing up in Alabama, I thought Alabama was bad, but to cross that line in going to Mississippi, it was very dangerous. Because of what happened during the freedom ride, we arrive at the greyhound bus station in Jackson, we were arrested, taken to city jail, filled the city jail, later to the county jail, we filled the county jail, people kept coming. They put us in the state penitentiary at Parchman-

HUNTLEY: How long were you in Parchman?

LEWIS: I stayed in Parchman for about 37 days, I didn't know what was going to happen to us in Parchman, whether we would ever get out of Parchman, because the 00:13:00moment we arrived in Parchman, they brought a group of black and white Freedom Rider men on a big truck and they brought women in the van and the moment we walked into what they called maximum security unit, there was guy standing there with this gun, his rifle drawn, and he said, "Sing your goddamn freedom songs now, we have niggers here that would beat you or eat you up." I didn't know what was going to happen.

And they ordered us in to a room and down a long hallway, they had all of the guys standing and they ordered each one of us to take our clothes off and so about a half an hour or longer, we stood and no one had any clothing on and then in two's they led us to take showers and if you had any facial hair, beard, a mustache, you have to shave it off and while you're there shaving or taking a 00:14:00shower, the guys still had their guns drawn on you and after you finish your shower, then they led you in two's to a jail cell, without any clothing and then maybe an hour later, they come and give you a pair, Mississippi state penitentiary, sort of greenish shorts and undershirt and that's what we kept on our entire stay there.

You take a shower once a week, couldn't read a book. a man from the Salvation Army came by and gave us the New Testament and the Psalms and I remember it so well, Bernard Lafayette wrote in my little New Testament, "presented to John Robert Lewis, June 21, 1961, by a man from the Salvation Army."

That was Mississippi and then therefore the members of the student nonviolent coordinating committee, for all of '61, in the spring of '62, started organizing in the heart of Mississippi, trying to get people ready to vote. The state of Mississippi in 1961 and 1962,3,4 and 5, had a black voting-age population of more than 450,000, but only about 16 or 18,000 Blacks were registered to vote.

There was so much fear. People afraid and they called us all the freedom riders, like here come the freedom riders, it was like Paul Revere corning, here comes the freedom riders.

HUNTLEY: In 1963, you became chair of SNCC; tell me about how that evolved.

LEWIS: I've been very active after Diane Nash and James Bevill and Bernard Lafayette left Nashville. I was still in Nashville as a student at Fisk, but 00:16:00still active in the movement there, in the local movement. And I think after Marion Barry left as chair and another young man, by the name of Chuck McDew, what we called the Central Committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, met in Atlanta and they elected me the national chair of the student nonviolent coordinating committee in June of 1963. I moved to Atlanta at the age of 23, and seven days later, I was invited along with Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Whitney Young of the Urban League, James Foreman of CORE, Roy Wilkins of NAACP, and others from different other organizations had a meeting at the White House to meet with Pres. Kennedy. And it was in that meeting that A. Phillip Randolph said to Pres. Kennedy that the masses are 00:17:00restless, the Black masses are restless and we're going to march on Washington.

And you could tell by their very body language of Pres. Kennedy, he didn't like what he heard, and he said, "Mr. Randolph or Brother Randolph, if you bring all of these people to Washington, won't there be violence and disorder and chaos? We would never get a civil rights bill through to congress." Mr. Randolph responded and said, "Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest." And so, after that meeting, we came out and had a few words with the media said that we had a meaningful discussion with the president and we're going to have a March on Washington and a few days later, to be exact, I think it was July 2, 1963. The six of us met in New York City and issued the call for the March on Washington and invited four major white religious and 00:18:00labor leaders to join us in issuing the call for the March on Washington.

HUNTLEY: During the March on Washington, when they were determining what you would say, and I guess the younger folks had developed a statement and A. Phillip Randolph thought it didn't meet his approval; tell me about that and how that evolved.

LEWIS: Well we all, the ten, the six black leaders, heads of organization, plus the four whiteheads' organization, they all had to prepare statements and to make them available the night before the March on Washington. Julian Bond, whose very much a part of the Atlanta student movement was the communication director 00:19:00for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And he had gotten advanced copies of my prepared speech and made it available to the media, and so it got out and the other people saw it.

They would say things in their speech that people didn't like. We all would stand at the Hilton Hotel at 16th and K. And someone knocked on my door that night before the march and it was Ben Rustin and Ben Rustin said, "John, come downstairs to the meeting, there's some problem with your speech." And I went down for this meeting with other people from the student nonviolent coordinating committee and Walter Rufus from the UAW, somebody representing Martin Luther King, I think it was Walter, Roy, someone representing Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young and James Foreman.

And people had some problems, one part of the speech said something like, "In 00:20:00good conscience we cannot support the administration's Civil Rights Bill, for it was too little too late." And I went on to say, "There's not anything in this bill that would protect old women and young children, involving peaceful nonviolent protest run down by policemen on horseback and chased by police dogs or something like."

Then down there in the bottom of the speech I said something like, "We're involving a serious revolution." "Listen Mr. President, you're trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts1md when it was a lot of rhetoric saying, you tell us to wait, you tell us to be patient, we cannot wait, we cannot be patient, we want our freedom and we want it now!"

Now at one point Vie(?) said to me, he was sort of joking, he said, "John, you know, say we cannot be patient, that may offensive to the Catholic Church, people believe in being patient." The Archbishop of the Diocese of Washington, 00:21:00Archbishop Obald had threatened not to give the implication if I kept the speech, so that was just sort of the beginning and I think Walter Rufus and some people in the Kennedy administration, some people think was Bobby Kennedy who had got to the bishop and was putting pressure on him to say to A. Phillip Randolph and to Dr. King that John Lewis must change his speech.

But what they really were troubled with, I said something like, "The party of Kennedy is the party of the Eastland, the former, the late senator, the Mississippi, who owned a plantation and treated black people in Mississippi like they were not even human. And they also said that the party of Rockefeller is the party of Goldwater, in reference to the conservative senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater and then I said, "Where is our party, where is our party?" And I 00:22:00raised a question, I wanted to know which side was the federal government on, but then before I ended the speech, early when I was working on a speech, I read a copy of the New York Times a few days earlier.

I saw a group of Black women in a southern Africa, carrying signs saying one man, one vote. So in my prepared text, I said something like, "One man, one vote is the African cry, it is ours too, it must be ours." And that became the rallying cry for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. But at the end of the speech I said something like, "If you do not see meaningful progress here today, the day may come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South. They said Sherman did, nonviolently."

And they objected to that, they thought it was too inflammatory, thought I was calling for violence. So we make the other changes, but the next day, even as 00:23:00the march started, all of us had gone up to Capitol Hill, met with the congressional leaders, we had marched to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and Mr. Randolph and Dr. King said, "John is there a problem with the speech?" So we met to the right side for Mr. Lincoln, away from the march, the platform and we started going through the speech and James Foreman, the executive director of SNCC and a young man by the name of Courtland Cox, who was a student, had been a student at Howard, very active.

The three of us were conferring with A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Dr. King and at one point; Mr. Wilkins says, "We really got to change that, John." 00:24:00And so I sort of said, ''You know this is my speech, this is a speech of those of us from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the reflective feeling and the attitude of the people that we've been working with."

And another point, Dr. King says, "John that doesn't sound like you?" And then Mr. Randolph said something like, "John we've come this far together for sake of unity; for the sake of staying together, can we make these changes in reference to Sherman?" But there were some people who wanted me to change or delete the word revolution, delete the phrase, black masters and A Phillip Randolph came to my rescue and he said, "There's nothing wrong with the use of the word revolution, I use it myself sometimes, there's nothing wrong with black masters, I use that also."

So we decided to delete any reference to Sherman and I sort of said, "If we do 00:25:00not see meaningful progress here today, the day may come when we will march through certain cities." And I called Birmingham and Atlanta maybe and Philadelphia, Harlem and different places.

HUNTLEY: In 1977, President Carter appointed you to ACTION. Will you talk about what ACTION was and what it represented?

LEWIS: Well in 1977 when I was appointed as the domestic director for the ACTION agency, it was the umbrella for several antipoverty type programs, hundreds and thousands of volunteers, old American volunteers, something we called foster grandparents, but it also, VISTA volunteers. Vista volunteers people to go and 00:26:00work in low-income neighborhoods and areas. It was in a sense the domestic Peace Corps, trying to help alleviate poverty, using the resources and skills of young people as well as senior citizens.

HUNTLEY: In '81 you were elected to Atlanta city council-

LEWIS: But in 1980, I went back to Atlanta, left Washington, went back to Atlanta and decided to run for a city council seat. And I remember having a discussion with Daddy King, the father of Martin Luther King, Jr. He was my pastor and he said to me, John we cannot defeat this man, his family own a beauty barber supply, they come to our weddings and our funerals, you just 00:27:00cannot defeat him, but if you decide to run, we're going to support you.

So I got out there in 1981, ran city-wide, had a wonderful group of young people, a lot of students and campaigned all over the city and got 69.8% of the vote. I see that the guy who had been on the city council for 24 years.

HUNTLEY: You know, congressman, I often wonder, and I don't know if you can answer this, but in Atlanta, people who were actively involved with the movement, became politically active there and were elected to officers. Birmingham, that didn't happen, and you know we're still discussing that, well why in Atlanta and not in Birmingham, but that's an issue that we'll deal with at another time, but I just wanted to throw that out. But in '86 you then were elected to congress, the 5th District of Georgia. Tell me about that.

LEWIS: Well, in 1985, the fall of'85, I had just been reelected as a member of the Atlanta City council and a few days later, the young man by the name of Wyche Fowler, who was holding the congressional seat, informed me that he was going to run for the senate and give up the seat and I made up in my mind then that I was going to run for that congressional seat.

So I called Julian or Julian called me, somehow we made a decision to have lunch together. Julian had been in the state house for 10 years and 10 years in the state senate, so we went to lunch because I knew he was interested in running for the seat and I was interested in running for the seat. And we had been good friends, very, very close, wonderful friends.

At this lunch, I said something like, "Senator, what are you going to do?" He said, "I'm running for Congress." And he called me Mr. Chairman; he always called me Mr. Chairman since I had been the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He said, "Mr. Chairman, what are you going to do?" I said, "I'm going to run for congress, I guess I'll see you on the campaign trail." That was the shortest lunch we ever had together, that was the most difficult campaign, probably the most difficult thing I ever done in my life really.

It was much more difficult to run for congress with someone that you love and struggle with and fought with, much more difficult than walking across a bridge in Selma. And we got out there, he wanted to go to Congress, I wanted to go too. It was probably the most publicized Congressional campaign of1986 during that 00:30:00year. It was hard, it was very tough, it was several of us running in the primary, but I knew Julian is very good; he is very, very good. He was well known, he was born in Nashville, but he was almost a native of Atlanta, could have been in Georgia politics for more than 20 years.

So I got out there and I had to become known, I was better known in Alabama probably, better known Mississippi and probably in South Georgia than in Atlanta, because a lot of my workers, not necessarily in Atlanta, it was other parts of the south, other parts of the country. So I got out there and I worked night and day, sometimes 24 hours and I kept saying during the campaign, send to Washington a workhorse, not a show horse.

I kept saying send to Washington a tugboat, not a showboat, it was not a necessary reference to Julian, but there were a lot of people running at that time. And then in the primary, it came down to the two of us. And we had a run-off, but earlier Julian received 47% of the vote, almost won it without a run-off. I got only 35% of the vote. Three weeks later, I went up 17 points, he went up 1 point. I knew if it came down to one-on-one, that I would outwork him, and the voters saw me working and they turned toward me.

It was a powerful coalition that came together, and I haven't had as tough a race since, it was very difficult, very hard and for a while, there was a schism that existed between us, but now we're back friends and buddies.

HUNTLEY: That was a question I was going to ask is the key issues facing you in congress and this nation at this point?

LEWIS: At this point, I think the nation, those of us in Congress, and the American people, got to find a way to bring the madness to an end. We got to stop the violence, this war; it is tampering really with the very soul of America. Sometimes I feel like we've lost our sense of direction, our sense of purpose. This is an unnecessary war and it makes me so sad when I hear that another group of people been killed in Iraq, not just our own men and women, but 00:33:00the innocent citizens there.

I think there's more terrorism now, it's a greater degree of violence because of what we've done and my greatest fear if this war continues much longer, that the generation, the young people growing up in the middle east, and they will hate generations of Americans for year to come. We've got to find a way to end it, bring the people home and try to reconnect with our allies and make the world a little more peaceful.

HUNTLEY: Do you see that happening in the near future?

LEWIS: I think it will happen, I think it will happen in the near future because all of the surveys, all of the polling data saying that the American people are sick, they're sick and tired of this war. They're saying that there's no 00:34:00justification for it, they believe like so many of us in the Congress believed that we were misled, many of our great majority of the Democrats, especially the great majority of African­ American members of congress didn't vote to go to war.

And in addition, we got to do something at home about seeing that all of our young people get the best possible education, we got to see that all of our citizens have access to good healthcare, I believe that healthcare is a human right and that the quality of the person's healthcare shouldn't be decided on the basis of the size of that person's wallet, or the zip code that that person lives in and we got to rebuild, we got to spend the necessary dollars to rebuild 00:35:00the gulf coast, including New Orleans.

We've got to rebuild places in Mississippi and in Alabama, if we can rebuild Europe after WWII, and we're spending billions of dollars to help rebuild Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, after we've destroyed it, we got to, not just build the physical structure of these places, we got to help rebuild the lives of people.

HUNTLEY: One final question, there is a continuing discussion about the Voting Rights Act of1965 expiring in 2007, can you give us your take on that issue?

LEWIS: The Voting Rights Act of1965 is still the most powerful nonviolent and 00:36:00perhaps one of the most progressive pieces of legislation that we've bad for many, many years, because it not only liberated blacks, but also it helped to liberated whites also. And one thing about white politicians, especially those in the south, they can count and they see all of these black people getting registered and voting, then they have to make some special efforts to see that their people get services and that they be responsive to the needs of these people.

They're people today, who would like to elect those section of the Voting Rights Act that going to expire in '07, they would like to them die. There's a section called Section 5, it deals with whole question, if any city of Birmingham, 00:37:00Atlanta, or Montgomery, or New Orleans, or Jackson, Mississippi, decided to change location of precincts, or decided to change from at large election to single member district, to jerrymander in a way, they have to get approval from the Voting Rights Section of the Department of justice.

Those of us in the Congressional Black Caucus and the majority members of the Congress shall then, take the position that the Voting Rights Act, in those sections, Section 5 and others were good and necessary in '65, they're good and necessary now. If we don't renew or extend it, there's a possibility that we can go back. You can use Georgia as a simple example, the State Legislature in 00:38:00Georgia, the first part 2005, passed a piece of legislation saying that you must have an official state photo ID to be able to vote.

Now in many parts of Georgia, to get a state ID, they can cost $25 or $30, so some of us call that modem poll tax, you can have a driver's license, but there are many people 80 and 90 years old or 75 years old without a driver's license and if you're a student at Georgia Tech, or Georgia State, or the University of Georgia, you can you use your student id, because these are state schools, but if you're a student at Morehouse or Spelman or Clarke Atlanta University, Emory, 00:39:00these are private schools, so your student ID wouldn't count.

So there's an extra burden, so in order for something like that to be disapproved or approved, we need Section 5 to say to the state of Georgia that is wrong and what we just had happen in Georgia, the career attorneys in the Department of Justice said this is wrong, it shouldn't happen. It violates the Voting Rights Act, the spirit and the letter of the Voting Right Act.

These are the 4 out of the 5 of career attorneys in the Department of Justice, but then the political attorneys came in, appointed by Pres. Bush, they said, "Oh no, it's okay." And so it's all coming out and then the other section that is scheduled, Section 203, deals with the whole question of language, if you 00:40:00speak Spanish, if you only know Spanish, maybe some eastern European language or some native American language, then we're saying that the voter registration form and the ballot should be in those language.

And some people said those sections should expire, but if you want everybody who are citizens and they're registered, they should be able to participate, so you keep Section 5 and you keep the language of the other section also. And I think when the Congress debates it later this year or earlier '06, we will renew and extend the Voting Rights Act. No one, no one, unless they just come from another planet, wants to be on the wrong side of this issue, because it is a powerful political issue.

We cannot go back, we cannot stand still, we got to continue to open up the 00:41:00political process and let all of our citizens come in, including the new immigrants, whether they're from Central and South America, whether they're from Haiti or from Africa, from EasternEurope, whether they're the people who've been living here all the time, but is not fluent in English.

HUNTLEY: Congressman, I want to thank you for taking time out and again, we welcome you to Birmingham and we're looking forward to being with you this evening.

LEWIS: Well thank you very much, I'm delighted and very pleased to be in Birmingham, I've always enjoyed coming here and especially coming to the Civil Rights Institute.

HUNTLEY: Thank you.

LEWIS: Thank you sir.