Saturday, 18 July 2020

JOHN LEWIS: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of John Lewis, the Civil Rights leader and Congressman, is online at the Guardian, you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. I was working
with some limits of space, or I think I would have gone into greater detail about the excisions from his March on Washington speech, and maybe about his effectiveness and ability to play hardball politics: you could never call Lewis an ineffectual Congressman.

I also missed a trick by not mentioning that March won a National Book Award. When he accepted the award, he broke down in tears, remembering how he had been refused a library card when he was young, which I had mentioned. They would have tied together nicely.

I do remain baffled by my paper's eccentric rules of grammar, by which the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's acronym, SNCC, is in caps, but the Congress Of Racial Equality's acronym, CORE, is rendered Core. Go figure. 

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