Mr. 'racial entitlement,' Justice Antonin Scalia, does not deserve to shine John Lewis's shoes

John Lewis, future congressman, after having his skull fractured
by police in a protest in Selma, Alabama, March 1965. In May of 1961, having graduated the previous year from Harvard Law School, Antonin Scalia was nearing the end of a year of traveling in Europe with his new wife. The same month, John Lewis and 12 other Freedom Riders, seven white and six black, were traveling on a Greyhound bus and a Trailways bus, headed South to protest segregated public transportation and test a fresh Supreme Court decision banning the practice. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, he and two other Freedom Riders got the first beating of their trip after leaving the bus to use public restrooms.

In Anniston, Alabama, the Trailways bus was attacked by a Ku Klux Klan mob, and firebombed after the doors were jammed. In Birmingham, Lewis and the nine other Greyhound Freedom Riders were arrested there and held overnight. President Kennedy arm-twisted the governor into providing a safe-conduct escort to take the riders from Birmingham to Montgomery, but when they arrived, the escort vanished and a mob appeared. As one of the riders, James Zwerg, stepped off the bus, someone shouted "Kill the nigger-loving son of a bitch!" With clubs and fists they attacked Zwerg, Lewis and other riders, as well as reporters and photographers. The cops, many of them Klansmen or sympathizers, did not show up for 20 minutes.

Three years later in 1964, now head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis coordinated Freedom Summer, the project in Mississippi where several hundred of us registered black voters. I was fortunate to have two training sessions led by Lewis, who was beaten and arrested twice that summer.

The next year, in March 1965, Lewis had his skull fractured by cops blocking a protest march over the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

By the time he was 25 years old, Lewis had suffered more than 40 arrests and a dozen beatings, some of them savage. The man displayed his courage again and again and again in the struggle to defeat Jim Crow.

John Lewis and James Zwerg, Freedom Riders,
after being beaten by Klansmen in
 Montgomery, Alabama, in May 1961. One of the key pieces of legislation to accomplish that, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was introduced by Lyndon Baines Johnson while Lewis was still recovering from the Selma beating. His head still bandaged, Lewis watched the speech on television with Martin Luther King, Jr.

That law didn't immediately end attacks on voters' rights. States or jurisdictions within states covered by the law continued to innovate new discriminatory measures whenever the federal government, either the courts or the Department of Justice, knocked down the latest effort to keep blacks, or Latinos and American Indians from exercising their fundamental right to vote. Under Section 5 of the law, the government didn't have to wait until after a discriminatory law was in place before taking action. The provision instead requires covered jurisdictions to clear any changes in the voting process in advance. Hundreds of changes have been blocked or altered under the provision.

Please continue reading about voting rights and John Lewis below the fold.