Cory Booker would make John Lewis proud
Making "Good Trouble"
Issue #834 The Choice, Thursday, April 3, 2025
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It wasn’t about breaking the late Strom Thurmond’s record, although that was a nice touch. Rep. Cory Booker’s 25-hour and 5-minute speech that ended on the House floor Tuesday night was about breaking – no, shattering – all pretense of decorum, protocol, and procedure that is supposed to be the norm in Congress. It was about acting like a real life-threatening emergency was going on, not just a disturbance in the force. Because this is not a drill.
What would John Lewis do in a moment like this? That was the question he asked himself.
On August 28, 1957, Rep. Strom Thurmond (D-South Carolina) did everything he could to preserve the old order and stand in the way of civil rights by performing what was then the longest filibuster in history that clocked in at 24 hours and 18 minutes. Six years later, Alabama Gov. George Wallace declared during his January 14, 1963, inaugural address: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
On June 11, 1963, Wallace added an exclamation point to his racism when he infamously stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to symbolically block the way of the two African American students, (Vivian Malone and James Hood) from entering – and integrating – the university.
Several months later, on August 28, 1963, a very young John Lewis was one of the speakers at the historic March on Washington. Two years later, in 1965, Lewis led the first of three marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the denial of voting rights to Black people in the South. The horrific clash with local law enforcement when the marchers tried to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge became known as Bloody Sunday. John Lewis’s skull was fractured during that encounter. Those are only a couple of examples of when Lewis got himself into “good trouble.”
Twenty years later, in 1986, Lewis was elected to Congress for his first of 17 uninterrupted terms in office, representing his home state of Georgia until his death on July 17, 2020.
Lewis is remembered as someone who refused to sit still and allow the rights of his people to be trampled by the likes of Wallace and Thurmond, who suffered under the delusion that their skin made them superior. But the far worse delusion was their belief that they could prevail against the likes of a John Lewis.
In Heather Cox Richardson’s great post about Booker’s action, she recounts Booker’s internal struggle about how best to meet the moment during times such as these. He asked himself how he could live up to Lewis, who urged everyone who cared about democracy and justice to get into “good trouble” because saving your own home is worth the fight.
“Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” said Booker before taking the longest and most principled stand of his life.
I already know some may still question the long-term effectiveness of what Booker did, questioning whether standing on your feet for a day is enough to change anything. The simple answer is no; that simple act of defiance all alone by itself is certainly not enough.
But that’s not the point.
The point is for all of us to act like there’s an emergency, for all of us to do something that disrupts, that draws attention and waves the upside-down flag of distress. The point is to let Booker – and the MAGAs and the country and the world – know that he is not alone. That there are more of us inspired to raise hell each and every day.
Without a doubt most of us do not possess the courage of John Lewis, and most of us cannot attract the surprisingly large protest crowds being drawn by Rep. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-New York) as they continue their anti-oligarchy tour.
But all of us can do something.
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