The subject of this book, John Lewis, embodied peaceful or nonviolent resistance in the fight against discrimination during the civil rights movement. While this was the dominant approach in the early years of the movement (roughly the 1950s and first half of the 1960s), other voices advocated a different approach that involved more confrontation. Lewis never wavered in his faith in nonviolence, even when it cost him personally, and that is the focus of Meacham’s book.

Lewis’s two biggest influences in this area were Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Martin Luther King. Lawson, while a missionary in India, studied the tactics of Gandhi and applied them to the struggle for civil rights at home in America, where he fused principles of nonviolent resistance with the doctrine of Christian love. As Lawson put it in the SNCC statement of principles, “By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and peace become actual possibilities” (62). King first put the nonviolent strategy into action during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to protest segregation on that city’s public buses.

Lewis learned about nonviolent resistance by attending Lawson’s weekly workshops and visiting the Highlander Folk School.