“Find a way to get in the way,” U.S. Rep. John Lewis said to more than 2,900 graduates of Washington University and their supporters at its 155th Commencement on Friday, May 20.
In a speech that lasted 18 and a half minutes and was often joined by cheers throughout the Brookings Quadrangle, Lewis challenged the graduates – whom he described as “beautiful” and “handsome” – to use their talents and training to expose injustice and improve the world.
“If you see something that is not fair, that is not right, that is not just, you must have the courage to do something about it,” Lewis said. “Get in the way.”
Lewis recounted his own heroic activism in the civil rights struggle, when he was beaten and feared death fighting racial injustice and segregation in the American South, but he described a wide scope of civil rights. “We must all live together as brothers and sisters,” he said, naming many races, sexual orientations and including the currently controversial gender position of transgender.
Speaking in a stormy election year, he urged the graduates to vote, describing the franchise as “precious and almost sacred.” He wittily insulted some of his (presumably Republican) colleagues in Congress, saying they were worse listeners than the chickens he used to practice his preaching to on his father’s farm in Alabama.
He did not mention the name of Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s surprising presumptive nominee for president, who has called for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, the erection of a wall along the U.S./Mexican border and the exclusion of Muslims from entering the country.
However, there was little doubt who Lewis had in mind when he said, “There are forces today who want to take us back. We can’t go back.”
The veteran Democratic battler said he said he would not be “partisan” and endorse a candidate for president. “Look,” he said. “Use your education,” implying that no thinking person would vote Trump into the presidency.
But his most stirring and frequently stated theme was for the young graduates to get in “good trouble, necessary trouble” by obstructing injustice anywhere they find it.
“You must leave here,” Lewis said, “and go out and get in the way.”
In a brief interview with The American after his speech, Lewis was asked if he had Trump in mind when he decried forces that want to turn the country back.
Lewis said he had in mind “the climate and the environment in America today that forces one to slow down for the desecration of the beloved community. We cannot let that happen. We’ve come too far. We’ve made too much progress to slow down or to stand still or go back. We have to go forward. Bring people together and not divide people.”
When asked what he would protest today, if he were a young man given the advice he had just given to the graduates, he said he would – and, in fact, will – protest abuses of immigrants and the environment.
“I’m trying to get the speaker of the House to bring before the Congress a comprehensive immigration reform bill. It doesn’t make any sense to have a million people living in fear. Little children afraid to go to school, little children afraid that their grandparents and mothers and fathers are going to be picked up, or that they will be picked up and taken some place else. It’s not right,” Lewis said.
“I’ll be protesting around the whole question of protecting and saving the environment. We have a right to know what is in the food we eat. What is in the water we drink? What is in the air we breathe?”
