Today my conversation is with Presidential Biographer, Historian and Pulitzer Prize Winning author of The Soul of America, Jon Meacham. He paints an intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and long time U.S. congressman John Lewis linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present. His latest book His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope is available at your local book store and on Amazon

At the age of 25 John Lewis marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge but he remained a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. 

Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.

For more on Jon Meacham

Today my conversation is with Presidential Biographer, Historian and Pulitzer Prize Winning author of The Soul of America, Jon Meacham. He paints an intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and long time U.S. congressman John Lewis linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present. His latest book His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope is available at your local book store and on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/His-Truth-Marching-Lewis-Power-ebook/dp/B088QLGQTJ">Amazon</a>
At the age of 25 John Lewis marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge but he remained a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called &ldquo;the better angels of our nature.&rdquo; From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family&rsquo;s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it&mdash;his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis&rsquo;s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God&mdash;and an unshakable belief in the power of hope.&nbsp;
Meacham calls Lewis &ldquo;as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.&rdquo; A believer in the injunction that one should love one&rsquo;s neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.
For more on <a href="http://www.jonmeacham.com/">Jon Meacham</a>

Kim Carson gets the Story Behind The Story...Celebrities, Authors, Politicians, Musicians, Athletes and the Everyday Person. Kim believes we all have a story to tell and we can learn so much from each other

Kim Carson gets the Story Behind The Story...Celebrities, Authors, Politicians, Musicians, Athletes and the Everyday Person. Kim believes we all have a story to tell and we can learn so much from each other

Conversations with Kim

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