His Truth Is Marching On by Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is an intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence—Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr.—to put his life on the line in service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” At age twenty-five, Lewis marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. From an early age, he learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality—practicing at age four by preaching to his family’s chickens, then refusing to eat one his mother cooked in what he wryly recalled as his first act of nonviolent protest.
Why it matters: As New York Times contributor Eric Foner notes, Meacham wants to show that despite evidence all around us of injustices committed in the name of religion, faith-based activism can produce a better society. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. By revealing how biblical teaching and spiritual formation shaped one of the most consequential activists of the twentieth century, the book offers a counter-narrative to both secular dismissal of faith and religious justifications for oppression, demonstrating that deep spiritual grounding can fuel persistent, nonviolent action for justice across a lifetime.