David Greenberg on John Lewis, in conversation with Kai Bird, Tues, Oct 29, 2024, CUNY Grad Ctr

David Greenberg on John Lewis, in conversation with Kai Bird
Tuesday, October 29, 6:30 pm
Elebash Recital Hall, the Graduate Center
365 5th Ave., New York, NY 10016
Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died.
Greenberg’s biography traces Lewis’s life through the post-Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South. The book reveals the little-known story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta, and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the “conscience of the Congress.”
Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg’s biography captures John Lewis’s influential career through documents from dozens of archives, interviews with hundreds of people who knew Lewis, and long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.
David Greenberg is a Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University and writes frequently on public affairs. He is the author of several books on American history and politics. His Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency, won the George Orwell Award, the Kennedy School’s Goldsmith Book Award, and the Browne Book Award. His first book, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, also won multiple awards. Formerly an acting editor of the New Republic magazine and a longtime contributor to Slate, he now writes regularly for Politico and other scholarly and popular publications. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale.
Executive Director of the Leon Levy for Biography Kai Bird co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005), which was made into a major motion picture by Christopher Nolan and won seven Academy Awards, including the Best Picture. He has also written biographies of John J. McCloy and McGeorge Bundy-and a memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis (Scribner, 2010). His book The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames appeared in 2014. His biography of Jimmy Carter, Outlier: the Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter , was published on June 15, 2021 by Crown Books.