As the Guardian’s Washington correspondent in the early 1980s one of my assignments was to travel the deep south and write about abuses of the Voting Rights Act, which were making it hard for African Americans to register for elections.
In the course of my work I called in for a chat with John Lewis, whose office was in sight of the state capitol in Montgomery, from where, at the time, the Confederate flag was still flying. It was late-morning and Lewis suggested we go out for a little lunch.
We climbed into his battered Chevrolet and drove into the Alabama countryside for almost an hour, during which Lewis provided commentary on sharecropping and agriculture in Alabama. Eventually, amid the peach groves we arrived at a large, unheralded shed-like structure which Lewis declared had the best fried catfish in the South. The place was heaving with workers in overalls drinking lemonade from oversized beakers with vast piles of deep-fried fish, chicken and root vegetables.
We ate a leisurely lunch (which Lewis insisted on paying for) interrupted only by his fellow African Americans paying their respects to the great civil rights leader who had marched with Martin Luther King from Montgomery to Selma.
Lewis recalled in detail the tension and violence of the march before instructing me on the devices used by white registrars to make it difficult for black voters to register. Documentation such as driving licences was demanded, but when it was produced the voters, kept waiting for hours in the beating sun, would be sent away for a second form of ID, which many simply didn’t have.
It required quiet diligence and determination for black Americans to register, two decades after President Lyndon B Johnson had signed the legislation.
The memory of that summer’s day and Lewis’s hospitality and wisdom remains fresh with me today.
