On September 19, 1803, the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet addressed the British imperial court that had condemned him to death for having led an abortive rebellion. His “speech from the dock” is the Irish equivalent of the Gettysburg Address, having supplied generations of Irish schoolchildren with grist for their rhetorical competitions. The most memorable passage came as Emmet was winding things up.

I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world—it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. Let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them.

John Lewis is still alive. That must be understood before the announcement of his illness causes the news cycle to inter him prematurely, and to cover the causes for which he still fights to be buried under flowers, and encomia, and empty pious bullshit of a very high grade. John Lewis is still alive. His causes are still this nation’s causes. His life’s work is unfinished, and it will remain unfinished, and the forces seeking to diminish it may pause if and when he finally passes, pauses for all the flowers, encomia, and empty pious bullshit, but those forces will be back at work very quickly after the funeral music fades. Votes still will be suppressed. Poverty still will be blamed on the poor. The question of race still will be put off for another day. But, for the moment, John Lewis is still alive.

Lewis and fellow Freedom Rider James Zwerg are splattered in blood after they were attacked and beaten by segregationists in Montgomery, Alabama, 1961. Bettmann Getty Images

What is it going to be like, I wonder, when the last of them goes, those American heroes who dared call Jefferson’s great bluff in the pulpits and the courts and in the streets? They have their heirs, no question about it. Bree Newsome. The Reverend William Barber, official preacher of this shebeen. The footsloggers of Black Lives Matter. They have their political successes: President Barack Obama, Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. But having watched over the years as Dr. King’s memory has been sanded down and smoothed out and used as a balm on white America’s guilty conscience—Dr. King wasn’t “divisive”? Then why’d someone shoot him in his head?—I wonder whether or not the entire Civil Rights Movement, and the very organized backlash against it, all that blood and death and massive resistance, will be neutered in history the same way. But John Lewis is still alive.



So let us give him the grace Robert Emmet demanded. Let none of us write his epitaph, now or whenever. Let’s not make a marble idol to our own consciences out of him. He is a beloved figure now, but he wasn’t a beloved figure to the people who tried to beat him to death. He is reckoned to be a figure of conciliation now, but he’s also still the young man whose proposed speech at the March on Washington was so fierce that the organizers took him aside—“in a room under Lincoln’s backside,” he always jokes—and told him to tone it down. He is a man who speaks often about “the beloved community,” but also someone who has demonstrated by his actions that he knows that the beloved community exists in a place that has to be seized and held, that it is not anyone’s easy birthright. His demands are still unmet, his sacrifices still unexpiated. John Lewis is still alive, dammit, and that should be enough for now.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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