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| Georgia Congressman John Lewis and Charleston master artisan Philip Simmons sat together on the “Seat of Defiance” in front of Simmons’ home Saturday. Lewis bought the bench that commemorates Rosa Parks’ refusal to go to the back of the bus in 1955. |
Philip Simmons’ blacksmith shop on Charleston’s East Blake Street is an endangered American treasure, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
On Saturday it felt like sacred ground as the Daniel-Island-born master artisan, 95, and the veteran Civil Rights campaigner, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, 67, sat together on the wrought-iron bench Simmons designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a bus.
"I am honored, pleased and humbled to be sitting here with this wonderful, gifted, talented man," Lewis said of Charleston’s celebrated ironworker.
Shaped like a bus seat, the bench has the outline of a bus and the year "1955" on its side. The words "Seat of Defiance" are burned into the middle slat of its wooden seat.
Lewis purchased the bench two years ago at an auction fundraiser for St. Helena Island’s Penn Center. He plans to install it in his Atlanta congressional office and will later bequeath it to Washington, D.C.’s African American History Museum when it is completed in nine years.
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| The Seat of Defiance is shaped like a bus seat and has the outline of a bus and the year “1955” on its side. |
"Most people know this talented man," Simmons said of Lewis. "And this talented man must have plenty of money because this talented man outspent all those people, and those people had money, too, you know."
"I’m just a poor boy from Georgia who grew up in Alabama," Lewis said, smiling. "But, thank you, it was for a good and noble cause and I’m very pleased and proud to be of some help."
The congressman is intimately familiar with bus seats. He was an original Freedom Rider in 1961 and was assaulted in Rock Hill, S.C. by a group of white toughs while trying to enter a "Whites Only" bus station waiting room.
"I hope that this Seat of Defiance will inspire people to get in the way, to take a seat, to speak up and to speak out," Lewis said. "Fifty years ago next month – September 1957 – I left rural Alabama on a Greyhound bus to go to Nashville. If someone had told me then – 50 years ago – that I’d be standing here in Charleston, South Carolina as a member of the House of Representatives representing the good people of Georgia, I’d have said you’re crazy, you’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re talking about."
Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Lewis was at the center of some of the most significant events in American Civil Rights history. At age 23, he was a keynote speaker at the March on Washington, site of King’s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Lewis led the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march that ended violently at the Edmund Pettus Bridge when the group was attacked by Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies. The event came to be known as "Bloody Sunday" and helped galvanize political support for the Voting Rights Act later that year.
During his half century of activism, Lewis has known many of the world’s most important historical figures. He visited John F. Kennedy’s White House; he was with Robert F. Kennedy moments before his assassination in Los Angeles and has conferred with the world’s most famous champion of human rights – Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela.
A gentle, soft-spoken man with an aura of quiet intensity, Lewis remains committed to the principals of non-violent social action that guided him during the 1960s Jim Crow era. Let’s hope that in this age of self-absorption and short attention spans, that his kind – like Philip Simmons’ blacksmith shop – are not on the endangered list.
