The Apology Heard Around the World

I never met Abraham Lincoln, but I was fortunate enough to meet John Lewis.

I hold both in the same awe and lofty esteem, these two great historical figures, these two American statesmen, these two down-to-earth men.

While products of different centuries, both championed the rights of people of color, holding dear to their convictions.

They were never not themselves.

Lewis, the veteran civil rights leader and longtime Georgia congressman, recently announced that he's been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, the third-leading causing death from cancer in the U.S.

In 1965, as head of a civil rights group called Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Lewis walked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, leading a voting rights march out of Selma, Alabama — and had his skull broken by white police officers while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Four years earlier in Montgomery, as a Freedom Rider who traveled the South challenging Jim Crow laws, a mob attacked with rocks, bottles and even a pitchfork, and a racist smashed Lewis’ head with a wooden Coca Cola crate, nearly killing him.

Lewis, now 79, knows he is gravely ill, but he remains a fighter. He has assured well-wishers that he still has “many bridges to cross.”

“I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”

John Lewis is an icon and a gentleman and I’ve had the privilege to shake his hand.

In 2014, while working as a national reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I was looking for a way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the nation’s monumental civil rights legislation.

My question: A half century later, was there a new South? Had anything really changed?

I called around to interview activists for ideas. One suggested that I spend time with a mixed-race couple south of the Mason-Dixon line to see what their life was like.

Then somebody suggested that I call Kevin Murphy.

A solemn man with an easy Southern drawl, Murphy in 2014 was the white police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, in a state whose very name oozes Southernness, in a city where in 1961 Lewis was pummeled senseless as the city’s predominantly-white police force stood by and watched.

In 2013, Murphy had done something remarkable: He offered Lewis a public apology.

Lewis had led his annual Washington delegation on a tour of civil rights sites as a way to acknowledge the fights of the past. The group stopped at the First Baptist Church, where the night of Lewis's beating, blacks had cowered in fear as torch-wielding whites rampaged outside. 

As chief, Murphy could have addressed the gathering with the usual platitudes. But he had secretly prepared other remarks that wandered well off-script.

As the room went silent, Murphy offered what is now known as “The Apology Heard Around the World.”

“I want to apologize,” he began. “We failed to protect you and the other Freedom Riders. In 1961, Montgomery police were not very good to you. But today, we’re a better department.”

Lewis stood and embraced the chief.

“I was trying hard,” Lewis said later, “to hold back my tears.”

He turned to sit down, but Murphy stopped him.

There was something else.

The chief took off his shiny badge and gave it to the veteran activist — a symbol of police oppression turned into one of reconciliation.

“Chief, you can’t do that,” Lewis said. “Don’t you need your badge?”

Murphy whispered: “I can get another one.”

Then someone stood and led the crowd in a song that was a mainstay of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”

It was a remarkable gesture that said so much about remorse and forgiveness.

I had my story.

That spring of 2014, I traveled to Montgomery to tell the story of two men from opposite race who had become friends.

Murphy had since been fired from the police department. His surprise public apology had not gone over well with the city’s white mayor. He's since joined the County Sheriff's department.

Murphy remained unapologetic. He and his wife took me out for Southern barbecue and we went to the First Baptist Church where he'd said the words that changed his life.

I nosed around town for a few days, and visited Mary Ellen Noone, a black woman from Birmingham who was one of hundreds to write Murphy after his mea culpa.

Apologizing on behalf of those “who would not protect us” spoke volumes, she wrote. “Nobody has ever done that.”

We sat in her darkened living room and she talked about how Murphy had made Montgomery a slightly more graceful place. She had the smooth voice of a wise grandmother and I liked hearing her talk. We corresponded for months after that.

Lewis, of course, had sent Murphy his own letter.

“It is not easy to confront dark moments in our past," he wrote. "Harder still is to try and atone for sins not our own. But you showed your own special courage that day at First Baptist Church, and I will be forever grateful.”

The apology, Lewis wrote, "had “brought comfort to my soul."

He signed the letter: “I am proud to call you my friend. I am proud to call you my brother.”

Lewis said he often carried the badge with him.

Not long after my visit to Montgomery, I met up with Murphy in Washington as Lewis took us both on his rounds, bringing Murphy onto the House floor, introducing him to legislators as “my friend, Kevin Murphy.”

Later, I joined both men as they sat at a conference table in Lewis’ Washington office, a bastion with walls covered by black-and-white photos of King, Robert F. Kennedy and Mahatma Gandhi. 

An old campaign poster showed a pair of wrinkled black hands casting a ballot. “Hands that pick cotton can now pick our public officials,” it read.

Lewis, a stout man with a preacher’s delivery, touched Murphy’s arm. “I love him like a brother,” he said. “For this young white police officer — who wasn’t even born in 1961, wasn’t even a dream — to do such a thing.” 

His voice broke off. “He spoke from the gut, from the depths of his soul.”

Then the two men shared a moment when they just sat there and looked at one another. Pure silence. Nothing more needed to be said.

I felt privileged to be there. I stopped writing, put down my notebook and felt the emotion well in my throat.

Yesterday, I called Murphy. He picked up on the second ring.

"Hi John," he said.

We're still on each other's speed dials.

We talked about Lewis, whom Murphy, now 56, still considers a father figure. Murphy had just sent the congressman a letter, wishing him Godspeed, saying he knew he would handle his health crisis with the same dignity and bravery that has defined his life.

He said he hopes Lewis will be well enough to lead his annual civil rights tour this coming spring.

Then we said a prayer for an international icon, weakened but not fallen.