Yale University Press Book Talk: Raymond Arsenault, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community

Please join us for a conversation with David W. Blight and Raymond Arsenault, about Professor Arsenault’s new book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community (Yale University Press, 2024). Light refreshments will be served.

David W. Blight is the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Sterling Professor of History at Yale University.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History Emeritus at the University of South Florida. He is the author of several award-winning books on civil rights history, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice; The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America; and Arthur Ashe: A Life.

Hosted by Yale University Press. Co-sponsored by the Department of History at Yale University and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University’s MacMillan Center.

About the book:

For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940–2020) was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into “good trouble.” In this first book-length biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis’s upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the “conscience of Congress.” Both in the streets and in Congress, Lewis promoted a philosophy of nonviolence to bring about change.

He helped the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders plan the 1963 March on Washington, where he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Lewis’s activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care. Arsenault recounts Lewis’s lifetime of work toward one overarching goal: realizing the “beloved community,” an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.

**This is a Hybrid event with a remote viewing option via Zoom.