President-elect Donald Trump began a long holiday weekend that honors slain black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. by attacking another rights activist and politician who had said he does not see Trump as a "legitimate president."
U.S. Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, said on a segment of "Meet the Press" released by NBC on Friday he thought hacking by Russians had helped Trump, a Republican, get elected in November. Lewis said he does not plan to attend Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, the first time he would miss such an event since being elected to the House in 1986.
On Saturday Trump tweeted that Lewis had falsely complained about the election results and instead "should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested)."
"All talk, talk, talk - no action or results. Sad!" Trump tweeted.
During the campaign, Trump said Democrats had failed African-Americans and Hispanics. "What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance," he said at a rally last year in Ohio.
Trump won the presidency with less support from black and Hispanic voters than any president in the last 40 years, only 8 percent and 28 percent, respectively, polling data showed.
The 76-year-old Lewis, who has been a civil rights leader for more than half a century, was beaten by police during a march he helped lead in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, drawing attention to hurdles for blacks to vote. He protested alongside King that day and on other occasions.
"I believe in forgiveness," Lewis said in the NBC segment about Trump. "I believe in trying to work with people," he said. "It’s going to be very difficult. I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president."
At least 10 other Democratic U.S. politicians have also said they plan to skip the inauguration, including Representatives Raul Grijalva, Lacy Clay and Mark Takano.
Supporters of Trump see him as a brash person who tells things as they are. His comments about Lewis came ahead of an anti-Trump march in Washington headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton. The protest by about 2,000 marchers kicked off a week of rallies planned by dozens of groups against Trump before, during and after the inauguration.
DisruptJ20, which is working with Black Lives Matter and other protest groups, said they are planning to disrupt balls celebrating the inauguration in Washington.
Several of Trump's fellow Republicans also criticized his tirade against Lewis.
Michael Steele, who served as the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee until 2011, said Trump's tweets were unfortunate.
"John Lewis has a walk that very few people in this country, least of all Donald Trump, have ever walked, so you have to respect that," Steele said on MSNBC.
If Trump is looking to fix a bridge to black voters, their expectation is he "will do so in a way that shows respect for our leadership," Steele said.
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska tweeted that "John Lewis and his 'talk' have changed the world."
Conservative critic Bill Kristol tweeted "It's telling, I'm afraid, that Donald Trump treats (Russian President) Vladimir Putin with more respect than he does John Lewis."
Some 12 hours after his first tweets against Lewis, Trump came back with one more recommendation for the black leader.
"Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!," Trump tweeted late in the day.
So who is John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and civil rights leader. He is the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district, serving since 1987, and is the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. His district includes the northern three-quarters of Atlanta.
Lewis, who as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the "Big Six" leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington, played many key roles in the Civil Rights Movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States. A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis is a member of the Democratic leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives and has served as a Chief Deputy Whip since 1991 and Senior Chief Deputy Whip since 2003. As Senior Chief Deputy Whip, he has led other Chief Deputy Whips and serves as the primary assistant to the Democratic Whip.
John Lewis was the youngest of the Big Six civil rights leaders as chairman of SNCC from 1963 to 1966, some of the most tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement. During his tenure, SNCC opened Freedom Schools, launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and organized some of the voter registration efforts that led to the pivotal Selma to Montgomery marches. As the chairman of SNCC, Lewis had written a speech in reaction to the Civil Rights Bill of 1963. He denounced the bill because it didn't protect African Americans against police brutality. It also did not provide African Americans the right to vote.
He graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville and then received a bachelor's degree in Religion and Philosophy from Fisk University. As a student, Lewis was very dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and took part in many other civil rights activities as part of the Nashville Student Movement. He was instrumental in organizing student sit-ins, bus boycotts and nonviolent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality.
In 1960, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. There were seven whites and six blacks who were determined to ride from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans in an integrated fashion. At that time, several states of the old Confederacy still enforced laws prohibiting black and white riders from sitting next to each other on public transportation. The Freedom Ride, originated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and revived by Farmer and CORE, was initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960) that declared segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional. In the South, Lewis and other nonviolent Freedom Riders were beaten by angry mobs, arrested at times and taken to jail. When CORE gave up on the Freedom Ride because of the violence, Lewis and fellow activist Diane Nash arranged for the Nashville students to take it over and bring it to a successful conclusion.
In 1963, when Chuck McDew stepped down as SNCC chairman, Lewis, one of the founding members of SNCC, was quickly elected to take over. Lewis's experience at that point was already widely respected. His courage and his tenacious adherence to the philosophy of reconciliation and nonviolence made him emerge as a leader. By this time, he had been arrested 24 times in the nonviolent struggle for equal justice. He held the post of chairman until 1966.
50th Anniversary of the 1965 Selma Marches - Former First Lady Laura Bush, First Lady Michelle Obama, President Barack Obama, John Lewis, and Former President George W. Bush
By 1963, as chairman of SNCC, he was named one of the "Big Six" leaders who were organizing the March on Washington, along with Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins. The occasion of Dr. King's celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech, Lewis also spoke at the March and is its last remaining living speaker. At 23 he was the youngest speaker that day.
In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts for "Mississippi Freedom Summer," a campaign to register black voters across the South. The Freedom Summer was an attempt to expose college students from around the country to the perils of African-American life in the South. Lewis traveled the country encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people in Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the union, to register and vote. Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches when, on March 7, 1965 – a day that would become known as "Bloody Sunday" – Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Lewis's skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge to Brown Chapel, the movement's headquarter church in Selma. Before Lewis could be taken to the hospital, he appeared before the television cameras calling on President Johnson to intervene in Alabama. Lewis bears scars from the incident on his head that are still visible today.
Historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence."
Lewis (far right) with Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, Congressman William Fitts Ryan, and James Farmer
John Lewis and the SNCC had reason to be angry. At 21 years old, John Lewis was the first of the Freedom Riders to be assaulted while in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He tried to enter a whites-only waiting room and two white men attacked him, injuring his face and kicking him in the ribs. Nevertheless, only two weeks later Lewis joined a Freedom Ride that was bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal. We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back," Lewis said recently in regard to his perseverance following the act of violence
In an interview with CNN during the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, Lewis recounted the sheer amount of violence he and the 12 other original Freedom Riders endured. In Anniston, Alabama, the bus was fire-bombed after Ku Klux Klan members deflated its tires, forcing it to come to a stop. In Birmingham, the Riders were mercilessly beaten, and in Montgomery, an angry mob met the bus, and Lewis was hit in the head with a wooden crate. "It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious," said Lewis, remembering the incident.
The original intent of the Freedom Rides was to test the new law that banned segregation in public transportation. It also exposed the passivity of the government regarding violence against citizens of the country who were simply acting in accordance to the law. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. The Kennedy Administration then called for a "cooling-off period," a moratorium on Freedom Rides.Lewis had been imprisoned for forty days in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi, after participating in a Freedom Riders activity in that state.
In February 2009, forty-eight years after he had been bloodied by the Ku Klux Klan during civil rights marches, Lewis received an apology on national television from a white southerner, former Klansman Elwin Wilson.
After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis worked with community organizations and was named community affairs director for the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.
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