Aug. 28: Day of destiny for John Lewis, Obama

DENVER — When Barack Obama accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for president Thursday night, in front of 75,000 jubilant supporters, John Lewis will see his life, and his country, come full circle from another historic Aug. 28.

Forty-five years ago, on Aug. 28, 1963, Lewis was one of 10 men who spoke before thousands at the March on Washington, the massive protest that has become best known for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

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Rick McKay/Cox Washington Bureau

Rep. John Lewis sits with the Georgia delegation in Denver this week.

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The march was a high point of the civil rights movement, a singular event that drove the struggle to the center of the national conscience and the national consciousness.

Then, Lewis was the youngest speaker at the march. Thursday night at Invesco Field, he will speak as a party elder, a two-decade veteran of Congress. This man who has seen so much will participate in an event he could not have imagined in 1963: A black man winning the party’s nomination for president.

“If someone had told me 45 years ago of what we’re about to witness, I would say, ‘you’re crazy, you’re out of your mind,’” Lewis said in an interview.

“It is a major, major step in making real the hopes and dreams and aspirations of so many Americans who attended the march and who supported the march,” he said.

This week, Lewis has honored others, as when he appeared in a video celebrating the life and career of U.S. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Lewis has spoken at a luncheon for civil rights icons, appeared at various breakfast gatherings, been treated like a hero. His convention experience will crest tonight in a sparkling football stadium, when it will seem to many veterans of the civil rights movement that their time has finally come.

On that afternoon in 1968, Lewis was much less optimistic.

“This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation,” Lewis thundered in Washington.

His ire was bipartisan.

“What political leader here can stand up and say, ‘My party is the party of principles?’” he said.

But much has changed since then, Lewis said.

“The Democratic Party has come such a distance from 1963,” he said, “under the leadership of people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and all that Lyndon Johnson said. Sen. Obama is the personification of what the Democratic Party is about.”

In his speech in Washington, Lewis called patience “a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually.”

“Wake up America. Wake up!” the Lewis of 1963 said.

The Lewis of 2008 is older and, yes, more patient. But Obama’s speech cannot come soon enough.

“I just don’t know what’s going to be my reaction,” he said. “I really don’t. I can see the 10 of us who stood after the march, after the speeches and the music was over, we went to the White House, met with President Kennedy. He stood in the doorway of the oval office and met each of us, and he was so proud and pleased that things went so well.”

While he’ll be surrounded by tens of thousands of people Thursday night, there will be a few ghosts, too.

“I just wish the other nine were here to be witness to this moment in our history,” he said. “It’s going to be meaningful. It’s just going to be overwhelming to be in Denver, in that stadium, in this moment.”