His Truth Is Marching On summary

The scene starts calmly. A group of Black students, dressed in their Sunday best, walk into a Woolworths department store in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. They sit at the lunch counter and try to order. That’s when things get ugly.

The counter is segregated, and the waitress tells the students to leave – but they don't. A crowd of white men gather, shouting slurs and threats. Still, the students remain. 

If you walk into a Greyhound bus station today, you'll see waiting areas, lunch counters, and restrooms filled with a diverse mix of people. Everyone shares the same space and travels side-by-side. While this might seem like a mundane scene, in the 1960s it was still a far-off dream.

Back in December 1960, the United States Supreme Court ruled that all interstate travel facilities, including bus stations, had to be desegregated. But despite the court's ruling, areas in the Jim Crow South were still divided by skin color.

An obscure student goes from being beaten in bus stations and department stores to sitting in the White House with the president of the United States. The scenario seems impossible – but this was the reality for Lewis. 

In June 1963, he was elected chairman of the SNCC. In this prominent role, he traveled with Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders to meet with President Kennedy. The topic of discussion was the upcoming March on Washington. 

September 15, 1963. Lewis, still energized from the March on Washington, returns to Alabama for a short break. He barely has time to catch his breath when the news comes in: there's been an explosion in Birmingham.

The details are horrifying. Early Sunday morning, Ku Klux Klan members detonated a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church – a Black church in downtown Birmingham – which had been full for Youth Day. The gruesome attack killed four young girls and injured dozens of people. 

The path from the small town of Selma, Alabama to the state capital, Montgomery, runs 54 miles down Highway 80. On any given day, it's a grueling walk. But March 7, 1965 wasn't just any given day. 

On this particular Sunday, Lewis and more than 600 other civil rights activists planned to march the entire route to protest the unfair voting barriers faced by Black Americans. George Wallace, Alabama's segregationist governor, was determined to stop them by any means necessary. 

Throngs of young people are in the streets. They're marching, chanting, and demanding their rights. This isn't Nashville in 1957 or Selma in 1965. This is Washington, DC in 2020. 

A few weeks earlier, police in Minneapolis, Minnesota killed a Black man named George Floyd. Now, a new generation of activists is fighting for justice.