WASHINGTON (AP) – Bernard Lafayette was all smiles as he watched his civil rights comrade John Lewis commandeer the floor of the U.S. House for an old-fashioned, marathon sit-in over gun legislation.
Lafayette goes back with Lewis to the student sit-in protests in Nashville, Tennessee, to the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Freedom Rides, more than a half-century ago. Now 75 and a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Lafayette said he was tickled but not surprised that Lewis, 76, abruptly pulled this page out of the civil rights protest playbook so many years after their student activist days – and after quietly representing an Atlanta district in Congress for nearly 30 years.
“To see him after these many years still sitting-in … that’s sort of engrained in him, that confidence that direct action can bring about some changes,” Lafayette said.
Long heralded as the moral conscience of Congress, Lewis did not play by the rules when he rallied fellow Democrats and staged a 25-hour sit-in on the House floor Wednesday and Thursday. There was something about the need to persuade GOP lawmakers to act on gun control legislation that struck Lewis’ soul, leading him to launch a rebellion hardly seen in Congress, drawing inspiration from his hero, Martin Luther King Jr.
“He taught me the way of peace, the way of love,” Lewis said Thursday during a rally outside the Capitol, where he led the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome” and vowed to stage another sit-in when Congress returns from recess. Democrats say Congress must act to stem gun violence in America in the wake of the mass shootings at an Orlando gay nightclub that killed 49 people and injured another 53.