#JohnLewis Blows Up @BernieSanders’ Civil Rights Record at Presser

At a press conference put on by the Congressional Black Caucus PAC announcing the endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) was asked about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ civil rights movement work.  The exchange is below:

Q: This one in particular is for congressman John Lewis. You were obviously a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Obviously Senator Sanders was involved in civl rights work in the Chicago are in the private sector.  What do you say on his previous work on civil rights and —

REP. JOHN LEWIS:  — well to be very frank I don’t want to cut you off but I never saw him. I never met him.  I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years — from 1963 to 1966.  I was involved in the sit-ins, the  freedom rides, the March on Washington and the March to Selma to Montgomery and directed the voter education project for six years.  But I met Hillary Clinton.  I met President Clinton.

The press conference was held on February 11, 2016 at the headquarters of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, two blocks from the Capitol. CBC PAC Chairman Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) had just announced the political action committee’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders. The endorsement came six days after Clinton’s narrow Iowa caucus win and one day after Sanders’ 22-point drubbing of Clinton in New Hampshire.

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) was the headliner, and his answer to the reporter’s question about Sanders’ civil rights work landed like a detonation on Twitter within 10 minutes. The Sanders campaign had been pointing to a 1962 photograph of Sanders being arrested at a University of Chicago sit-in against segregated housing as part of a case to younger Black voters that he belonged in the civil rights tradition. Lewis, who chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966 and was beaten unconscious by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, said he had never encountered Sanders during that period.

The Sanders campaign pushed back within hours. Michael Briggs, the senator’s spokesman, pointed to a January 1962 Chicago Maroon article and contemporaneous Chicago Tribune coverage that showed Sanders, then a student at the University of Chicago, was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality and helped organize a 15-day sit-in at the university administration building over the school’s segregated off-campus housing policies. A widely shared black-and-white photograph from the Chicago Tribune archive showed Sanders being led away by police at a protest against segregated Chicago public schools.

Lewis amended his statement two days later on Facebook. “I have said over and over I did not meet Sen. Bernie Sanders during the movement,” Lewis wrote. “I did not intend to make that a sweeping statement about his activities.” He did not withdraw the endorsement of Clinton.

The exchange mattered because it reset what counted as civil rights work in the 2016 primary. Lewis was drawing a line between the dangerous Southern campaigns of SNCC, the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 and the voter registration drive that cost the lives of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and Northern student activism of the same period. That line is a real one, and Black voters in South Carolina understood it. On February 27, Clinton won the state with 86 percent of the Black vote over 14 percent for Sanders.

The sharper point was about endorsement power. The CBC PAC endorsement is not the same as a Congressional Black Caucus endorsement. The caucus itself does not endorse. The PAC is a separate legal entity with its own board, and the Sanders camp noted that several CBC members, including Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) who chairs the Progressive Caucus, were backing Sanders. Ellison later said the PAC did not represent the full CBC membership.

What Lewis did at the podium on February 11 was use his moral authority as one of the last living leaders of SNCC to fence the definition of civil rights credentials. Whether that fence held up under cross-examination is a separate question. The video of the exchange became the single most shared piece of the CBC PAC announcement, and not for the endorsement it was meant to deliver.