The recent passing of US Representative John Lewis generated many tributes to his legendary life and career. Lewis achieved prominence early in life as one of the most visible leaders of the Southern civil rights movement, a reputation that was well earned. He was one of the first Freedom Riders, served as one of the key organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and led the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

After the height of the movement in the mid-1960s, Lewis spent the next two decades continuing his civil rights organizing. He also began to get involved in government, winning a seat on the Atlanta City Council in 1981. In 1986, he won a seat in the US House of Representatives, which he held until his death. He spent this long career in the House drawing on a broad personal interpretation of the legacies of the civil rights movement. His advocacy included not only supporting the African American freedom struggle but also defending civil liberties and privacy rights in the face of government surveillance, supporting national guaranteed health insurance, and securing LGBTQ rights.

One of the less remembered episodes of his career, the 1987 Mariel Cuban uprising in Atlanta's federal penitentiary, deserves further consideration in our current moment, given metro Atlanta's burgeoning status as a destination for immigrants. The story should also be remembered as an important moment in Lewis's own rights-focused career. After the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, many of its leaders, including Lewis, continued to advocate not only for the rights of African Americans but also those of other traditionally marginalized groups, such as immigrants. In this specific instance, Lewis urged compassion and understanding for the Cubans imprisoned in Atlanta, extending the broad legacies of the civil rights movement into a new era.

The story began in October 1980, when Cuban president Fidel Castro allowed any Cuban who wanted to leave the island to do so. Thousands of Cubans accepted the offer, with around 125,000 fleeing the island for the nearby shores of Florida. Most of the immigrants settled in Miami, and many eventually gained US citizenship. On the whole, in the context of Ronald Reagan's Cold War anticommunism, these Cuban migrants received much more American support than did other Caribbean migrants fleeing persecution, such as those trying to escape Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier's Haiti around the same time.Footnote ¹

However, some of the migrants included Cubans who had been incarcerated in Cuban prisons. Others broke American laws after reaching the United States. These two groups of “excludables” were imprisoned at various sites, among them the Atlanta federal penitentiary. The Atlanta penitentiary had achieved national fame decades earlier for holding socialist leader Eugene Debs and Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman, both imprisoned for antiwar activities during World War I. It was notable that some of the Cuban detainees had been incarcerated in Cuban prisons for anti-Castro activities, which they thought would earn them acclaim in the United States. However, they were treated just the same as any other supposed “criminal,” locked up in American prisons and jails upon arrival. And once they had admitted to serving time in Cuban prisons, they could not recant this admission. It was a baffling and shortsighted decision, but one that was implemented nonetheless in the misguided name of community security.Footnote ²

These “excludables” remained in legal limbo for several years, with American authorities unsure of what to do with them. The United States and Cuba agreed in 1984 on the return of most of the prisoners to Cuba, but the accord fell through due to ongoing diplomatic difficulties between the two nations. However, the two nations restarted the agreement in November 1987 after further negotiations, and deportation now seemed suddenly imminent. The Cuban prisoners held in Atlanta, who emphatically did not want to return to Castro's Cuba, became desperate. They took control of the prison and captured more than a hundred hostages. After eleven tense days, the Cubans agreed to surrender in exchange for a lengthier review process. One person, a Cuban prisoner killed by a corrections officer, died in the standoff. In the end, because of ongoing tensions between the United States and Cuba, most of the prisoners eventually received community release in the United States and never returned to their home country.Footnote ³

Georgia's representatives in the US Congress had divergent views on the prison uprising. Republican Pat Swindall, whose district was based in DeKalb County, argued that the prisoners in Atlanta should not be allowed to enter the general US population, as they represented a threat to public safety and order. He warned his constituents that, if released, these prisoners might end up on the streets of DeKalb's communities, with potentially perilous consequences for the county's citizens. However, the newly elected Lewis argued that the prisoners had undergone extreme stress while incarcerated, leading to the desperate uprising, and that they should be treated with compassion and humanity. He claimed that, given proper support, they could enter American communities and make new, productive lives for themselves. Swindall and Lewis engaged in a sustained public debate through statements in newspapers, in debates on radio programs, and in the chambers of Congress itself, with each arguing vociferously for his side of the issue.Footnote ⁴

In the end, Lewis's position won out, and the Cubans were allowed to remain in the United States. This was arguably due more to the chronic diplomatic difficulties between the United States and Cuba and less to his individual efforts. Nonetheless, the episode deserves attention during summaries of Lewis's career as a clear example in which he urged compassion and understanding for marginalized groups of people. Lewis viewed the recognition of the essential humanity and dignity of immigrants seeking safety and opportunity as part and parcel of the same set of concerns that motivated his advocacy for African American equality in the civil rights era and beyond. For Lewis, the “civil rights” for which he marched in the 1960s were one component of a broader constellation of “human rights” based in ideas of essential human freedom and dignity. And, in turn, concerns for immigrants and refugees have become an essential and enduring part of Atlanta's broader cultural identity. Highlighting the importance of the Mariel Cubans incident is especially significant given the growth of immigrant communities along Atlanta's Buford Highway, and the emergence of the DeKalb County city of Clarkston as a refuge for migrants fleeing Somalia, Ethiopia, Syria, and other areas of conflict. Such changes are, in part, a legacy of Lewis's commitment to inclusive liberalism.

Lewis continued to extol these values, articulated in the first days of his time in Congress, throughout the duration of his career. John Jackson, the chair of the DeKalb County Democratic Committee, recently told me about an interaction he had with Lewis a few years ago. In response to the common right-wing use of the pejorative term “illegal immigrant,” Lewis stated emphatically that “there's no such thing as an illegal human being,” thereby imparting dignity and legitimacy to some of the most marginalized individuals in contemporary American society.

Indeed, immigration continued to be a controversial political issue in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, during which Lewis became a key congressional voice for inclusive liberalism. In 1996, responding to the rising influence of the US conservative movement, Bill Clinton signed into law an immigration bill, passed mainly by Republicans, that greatly expanded deportations of undocumented foreign nationals. Unsurprisingly, Lewis cast his House vote against the bill. In the 2000s, George W. Bush supported a comprehensive reform plan. It would have strengthened enforcement of border controls between the United States and Mexico but also provided a path to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. The plan failed due to opposition from both parties, each of which found something to dislike about the compromise. The bill originated in the Senate and never made it out of that chamber. If it had ever made its way to the House, it seems nearly certain that Lewis would have supported the path to citizenship and assailed the enhanced border enforcement.

But no American president in many years made immigration such a central part of his campaign and presidency as Donald Trump. Before the launch of his bid for the White House, Trump gained notoriety as the chief proponent of the “birther” conspiracy depicting Barack Obama as a Kenyan national ineligible for the presidency of the United States. And Trump's 2015 campaign launch, which depicted immigrants from Mexico largely as drug dealers and rapists, recalled and amplified Pat Swindall's comments about the Mariel Cubans nearly thirty years earlier.

Decades after his skirmishes with Swindall, Lewis became one of the most visible opponents of the Trump administration's most controversial immigration initiatives. In the early days of Trump's presidency, the administration curtailed immigration from several nations with primarily Muslim populations, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It also suspended the United States’ refugee admissions program for 120 days. The administration claimed that the moves were necessary in order to prevent the entry of terrorist elements into the United States, but opponents assailed them as a thinly veiled religious test instituted to appeal to the president's evangelical Christian conservative base. Political figures gathered at airports across the country to speak out against the move. As California governor Gavin Newsom attended one such gathering in San Francisco and Representative Jerry Nadler participated in a protest in New York City, John Lewis sat alongside attorneys and activists gathered at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport. A photo published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed him sitting calmly in the airport during the event, but his words were clear and direct in articulating strong moral opposition to the policy.Footnote ⁵

The next summer, Lewis participated in a march through downtown Atlanta organized in opposition to the administration's policy of family separation at the US-Mexico border, in which Central American children were torn from their parents as a deterrent measure. He exhorted protesters to “not be satisfied with the order of things” and to speak out in the face of state-sponsored cruelty, a similar message as that which he had imparted to African American civil rights marchers decades before.Footnote ⁶ Just a few days before his death in July 2020, Lewis spoke out against the administration's attempts to deny visas to foreign students whose university classes had been moved online during the coronavirus pandemic, a policy on which the administration later backtracked.Footnote ⁷

Indeed, following Lewis's moral leadership, metro Atlanta became one of the key sites of resistance to Trump's immigration policies. In September 2018, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms signed an executive order banning the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement from housing its detainees at the Atlanta city jail, a major blow to the agency's perceived invulnerability under Trump.Footnote ⁸And when Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock defeated David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in a pair of January 2021 US Senate runoffs, their victories came not just by way of enormous African American turnout across the state, but also significant Latino/a and Asian American voter participation in metro Atlanta.Footnote ⁹

In the final years of his career, Representative Lewis also contributed to the mission of Freedom University, which enlists college and university faculty, along with other educators, to provide instruction to undocumented immigrants in Georgia, as the state bans them from admission to its top public universities. Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis, executive director of Freedom University, first interacted with Lewis in spring 2008, when she was a doctoral student at Emory University studying social movements. As a student activist, she organized a panel examining the legacy of the African American civil rights movement within a broader human rights framework, and invited Lewis to participate, along with other veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Atlanta Student Movement. On the panel, Lewis emphasized his conception of his civil rights work as existing within a broader context of human rights issues related to employment, education, police brutality, and other such topics. The event established a professional relationship between Soltis and Lewis.

In 2010, the Georgia Board of Regents, which oversees Georgia's public university system, banned undocumented immigrants from enrolling in the state's top public universities and barred them from receiving in-state tuition rates throughout the state. In response, college and university faculty unofficially taught affected students for eight weeks in fall 2011 in Athens, site of the University of Georgia. They called the project “Freedom University.” Another eight-week session took place the following fall. Although some observers originally thought that the ban might not last long, the Board of Regents refused to change its policy. In 2014, Soltis reestablished Freedom University in Atlanta in order to bring the organization closer to the undocumented students it served and to establish relationships with Atlanta's private universities and social justice organizations. In addition to expanding the instructional program, Soltis formulated a strategy of enlisting students at the state's private universities, which are not subject to Georgia Board of Regents policies, to apply pressure on private universities to admit undocumented students, thereby providing an alternative to the public university system. Soltis brought together Emory University students and undocumented students at Freedom University and created the “Freedom at Emory” campaign coalition.

In spring 2014, Lewis delivered the commencement address at Emory's law school, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. He also gave the keynote address at the university's main graduation ceremony, attended by both undergraduate and graduate students along with their families. Before the event, Soltis contacted Lewis and asked if he would use the platform to advocate for the rights of undocumented students, which he unreservedly agreed to do. In the address, Lewis demanded comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and called on the graduating students to help make it happen.

With the additional help of Lewis's advocacy for the Freedom at Emory campaign, Emory's president James Wagner announced that the institution would allow individuals protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to enroll at the university and receive need-based financial aid. Building on this initial victory, Soltis helped lead a second campaign, the Emory Sanctuary Coalition, in 2017, which successfully convinced the university to admit fully undocumented students without DACA status. As Soltis noted in a conversation with me on May 4, 2021, the student coalition deserves recognition for the policy changes, just as the student coalitions of the 1960s pushed the South toward revolutionary change. In the case of Emory, Lewis's moral leadership, which was provided enthusiastically and unreservedly, contributed to student efforts and helped push the administration toward action. According to Soltis, perhaps Lewis's most notable virtue was that he “never needed convincing of what was the right thing to do.”

When I presented material on the Mariel Cubans case in February 2019 at the annual Southern Studies Conference in Montgomery, Alabama, one of the audience members identified herself during the question-and-answer period as a metro Atlanta native. Although she had taken courses on Georgia history during middle school and high school, she said that she had never heard of this episode before. Given the importance of Atlanta's identity as a destination for immigrants and refugees and the growing scholarly and popular interest in our nation's complicated systems of incarceration and punishment, she argued that the incident should be mentioned in future courses on Georgia history as a way to bridge these two trenchant and timely themes. For all of the reasons mentioned here, and for the continued recognition of John Lewis's deep and trenchant impact on the history of modern Atlanta, I agreed with her.