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By MARCUS FRANKLIN, Times Staff WriterJohn Lewis helped make African-American history. Now his long fight to see it told in a museum on the Mall in Washington is nearly won.
WASHINGTON - Once during John Lewis' battles against segregation, someone struck him about the head with a wooden soda crate, knocking him unconscious.
Later, in 1965, Alabama state troopers attacked Lewis and hundreds of other voting rights marchers with billy clubs and tear gas as they crossed a Selma bridge on what became known as "Bloody Sunday."
"I thought I was going to die" at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, recalled Lewis, who would go on to become a Democratic congressman from Georgia. "I thought I saw death that day."
Still, that resistance in some ways was not nearly as stubborn as what Lewis faced for 15 years while pushing one of his dearest issues in Congress.
In every session since 1988, Lewis introduced a bill to correct what many view as a glaring omission in the capital's renowned collection of museums: a museum of African-American history and culture along the National Mall.
Here, he faced down not arrests and beatings, but indifference, pettiness and the glacial pace of Washington.
"Getting the museum approved has been a long, almost impossible task," Lewis, 64, said as he sat in his Capitol Hill office. "We didn't know how long it was going to take, and we didn't know how difficult it was going to be."
At least with the civil rights movement, measurable successes kept morale up. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example, became law five months after the bridge attack, although protests began long before.
"That was different because you had a mass movement, you had a political climate and environment that said to the president and the Congress, "You may have a desire to say no but because of . . . all this pressure, you're going to do right,' " Lewis said of the civil rights movement.
"The climate and the environment in the halls of Congress are altogether different."
Finally, last year, after an unlikely alignment of allies, Lewis and his supporters triumphed.
Congress approved a national museum that could ultimately cost upward of $300-million as part of the Smithsonian Institution. President Bush signed the legislation in December.
Efforts to erect an African-American museum on the Mall predate Lewis, going back nearly 90 years. But it was Lewis, who belonged to the "Big Six," an inner-circle of civil rights giants that also included Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph, who led the effort longer than any other member of Congress.
"It's appropriate for him to get a tremendous amount of credit for this," said Robert L. Wilkins, a 40-year-old Washington lawyer who quit his job as a public defender to help champion the museum.
"No one person can make anything like this happen, but without his effort we wouldn't be here today, no question about that," Wilkins said. "He's somebody who . . . has carried the ball for 15 years."
Lewis, who grew up on an Alabama farm, spent much of the 1950s and '60s protesting for civil rights. He campaigned with Democratic presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and was with Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968 when Kennedy was fatally shot.
He remained an activist, heading voter projects and running a federal volunteer agency for the Carter administration. In 1981, he won an Atlanta City Council seat. Five years later, he resigned to run for Congress.
Arriving in Washington after his election in 1986, he noticed right away the lack of representation of the black people who had helped build the nation.
In the Capitol, he saw no paintings or portraits of African-Americans. Officials installed a bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Capitol Rotunda - the first statue of a black person in that area - but a staircase obscured it.
Outside the Capitol, he saw a city that Benjamin Banneker, an African-American astronomer and surveyor, helped design. Lewis saw buildings like the White House, Treasury and the Capitol that blacks, free and enslaved, helped construct. He saw the National Mall, where slaveholders once penned and sold Africans.
None of that history, nor myriad other examples, had been collected under one roof in comprehensive, sweeping fashion for the city's tens of millions of annual visitors. The absence, Lewis says, diminishes the depth, complexity and accuracy of the American story that Washington's museums tell collectively for people around the world.
Yes, Lewis said, visitors to the National Museum of American History, may see part of a lunch counter from a Greensboro, N.C., sit-in or shoes someone wore during the march on Washington.
"But you have this unbelievable missing chapter, and that chapter must be told in its fullness," Lewis said during lunch recently in the House Members' Dining Room. "And it will be told on my watch."
The first bill Lewis introduced in 1988 to create a national African-American museum never reached a vote.
In 1989, the bill failed in the House and Senate. (That same year, Congress approved the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian along the Mall, scheduled to open this September.)
In 1992, success seemed likely when the Senate voted to put a museum in the 123-year-old Arts and Industries Building on the Mall. But then-Rep. Gus Savage, an Illinois Democrat, killed the bill in his committee. Savage felt the museum deserved a new building such as the 300,000-square-foot U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that was to open in 1993.
In 1994, Savage was no longer in Congress, but Jesse Helms was. The North Carolina senator feared approving the bill would open the door for other ethnic groups to demand museums.
Between 1995 - the year Republicans retook control of Congress - and 2000, Lewis' bills never reached a hearing or vote.
"Except for Jesse Helms putting a hold on it, we never had overt, hostile opposition," Lewis said. But passionate support was lacking.
"Even some of my black colleagues - they all supported it - didn't get out there and champion it because it didn't have a lot of sex appeal," Lewis said.
He knew he made some people uncomfortable. "They think, "Here he comes again with this bill. He won't go away,' " he said.
"I can't even imagine how much time we spent on the museum," Lewis said. "Meetings on top of meetings with members of the House and Senate to get it moving.
"Sometimes we thought we had dotted all the i's and crossed all the little t's and it was supposed to be out of committee and on the floor and it didn't happen for some reason. Then you have to go back. . . . I was always hopeful."
A major turning point came in 2001. With key Republican allies such as Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and then-Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, Congress approved an 18-member presidential commission to come up with a plan to make the museum happen.
One member was Robert Wilkins. In 2000, the Harvard-trained lawyer quit his Washington public defender job to work on the issue full-time.
He spent his time poring over files at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, among other places. Government papers showed the quest for the museum dated back to at least 1915, when black Civil War Union veterans collected money for a national museum they envisioned would "depict the Negro's contribution to America."
Eventually, in March 1929, Congress and the president approved a building but provided no seed money. That October, the stock market crashed, and the legislation gradually faded from public memory.
Between 1968 and 1986, lawmakers made at least two sustained but unsuccessful attempts.
"It's fascinating history," said Wilkins, now practicing law at a private firm. "I think it helped to some degree shame some members of Congress into realizing it was really time to take this seriously."
Watts said a bipartisan group of four lawmakers, Lewis and himself in the House, and Brownback and Max Cleland, D-Ga., in the Senate, lobbied their own parties until support swelled.
"The tie that kept us all together was that we all believed it was a story that needed to be told," Watts said. "People realized it was an idea whose time had come.
"I was proud for John."
Lewis, Wilkins and others want to see the museum placed along the Mall, the "nation's front lawn," for symbolic and practical reasons.
The cachet of the Mall, the roughly 2-mile-long expanse between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol, would attract private donors, who will finance half the project, advocates say.
That site also would attract more visitors, particularly tourists unlikely to venture outside the "museum community." Tourists will "stumble upon a magnificent building" and decide to go inside, said Wilkins, who chaired the commission's site and building committee.
Instead, the legislation says the Smithsonian's Board of Regents must select a site from among four choices by the end of the year. Two are on the Mall, two other possibilities are two to four blocks south.
A Mall location "would send a very powerful and strong message," Lewis said. "It shouldn't be relegated to some dark corner of some off the beaten path. It should be as visible and as accessible as possible.
"You can't separate African-American history from American history. It's our history."
But the liaison for the Smithsonian regents said it was far too early to know which site the regents preferred. Land-use studies must be done, but the Smithsonian has yet to receive any funding. President Bush set aside $5-million for initial planning in his proposed fiscal 2005 budget, but lawmakers won't approve the final budget before summer.
As they await money, Smithsonian officials are prepared to have the museum's 17-member council in place by mid June. Then a search for a director will begin, said James Hobbins, executive assistant to Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small.
Wherever the museum eventually fits in the Smithsonian's lineup, surely there will be a place in it for a co-founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He toiled in the violent fields of civil rights before entering the halls of government where resistance often looks different.
But sitting at the round conference table in the inner-office of his office, Lewis, who has less hair and more girth than in his protest days, is modest at the suggestion of the space his efforts might take up.
"Oh, I won't occupy any space. I won't have it. It won't be for me to make that decision. I won't occupy any space," he said initially.
But then he added: "Maybe, just maybe, there'll be some mention when they display the civil rights movement, when they get to that point of the late '50s and the '60s."
Having lived through such a turbulent era, Lewis hopes the museum will help heal the nation's racial wounds and inspire young people to take up a cause. They're often too cautious, Lewis said.
"No group of Americans has undergone what black people went through, and still survived," Lewis said. "All of that has to be out there. A lot of people don't want to see it. They say, "Why are you bringing all of this back? That's a shameful and dark period in American history.'
"But we have to see it, we have to feel it. We cannot put it in some corner, sweep it under some rug. In the process, people will see the distance we've come, the progress we've made. Hopefully, that will help set us on the road toward healing and reconciliation."
- Marcus Franklin can be reached at mfranklin@sptimes.com or 727 893-8488.