Honored to Know Him But Didn't Know Him Too Well

Stop me if you've heard this—

marco rubio's tweet about john lewis - which is now his profile pic - is a photo of elijah cummings. pic.twitter.com/S5N53I2tRI

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) July 18, 2020

Would have been an even greater honor to know which great bald African American congressman who's died in the past year he was.

Not Rubio's profile pic any longer, of course, and he's come up with a correction featuring an actual shot of Lewis

Earlier today I tweeted an incorrect photo

John Lewis was a genuine American hero

I was honored to appear together in Miami 3 years ago at an event captured in video below

My God grant him eternal resthttps://t.co/aEm4MxKxBP pic.twitter.com/0UpWSG3vNQ

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 18, 2020

Though he still couldn't do it without a typo "My" for "May").

A valuable lesson from one tweep:

Marco Rubio can't tell two black men he DOES know apart, but he's sure that police officers and eyewitnesses can tell black men they DON'T know apart.

— Jonathan Allen (@jallen1985) July 19, 2020

Necessary Trouble

One of the things I don't feel I'm hearing in the tributes to Representative John Lewis, who died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 80, is his role as the spiritual heir of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the apostle of nonviolence.*

Not just a spiritual discipline but an effective weapon for change, of course, for which the training was practically military (as he explained in this interview with Krista Tippett)

And we had a teacher by the name of Jim Lawson, a young man who taught us the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. We studied. We studied what Gandhi attempted to do in South Africa, what he accomplished in India. We studied Thoreau and civil disobedience. We studied the great religions of the world. And before we even discussed a possibility of a sit-in, we had role-playing. We had what we called “social drama.”

And we would act out. There would be black and white young people, students, an interracial group, playing the roles of African Americans, or an interracial group playing the roles of white. And we went through the motion of someone harassing you, calling you out of your name, pulling you out of your seat, pulling your chair from under you, someone kicking you or pretending to spit on you. Sometimes we did pour cold water on someone — never hot — but we went through the motion.

But at bottom, the way of love: