A mayor, a filmmaker, a Navajo Nation president: Our take on Leaders of Change
by Eileen Rivers, USA Today
We set out to find the next John Lewis, that leader who is going to guide us through the chaos of today's civil rights fight.
Who is the next John Lewis?
That question quickly became the directive for this Leaders of Change project: Find the hardworking small-town activist, compelling national thought leader, outspoken public figure who is pushing for change — a person with the ability to rise up and lead the nation through the chaos of today's civil rights fight.
When I think about the late activist, who died in July after a battle with cancer, I think of a young Lewis (captured permanently in black-and-white footage) walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, standing up to state troopers who tried to beat him down.
But of course there was much more to the congressman, who remained an energetic and dynamic leader until his last breath at 80. More than anything, he encapsulated a sense of hope, something I felt strongly during my interview with filmmaker Dawn Porter. She was one of our picks, not just for her recently released film about Lewis, but also for her collection of social justice work that includes an examination of justice system struggles for poor people in the deep South.
As a representative in Congress for 33 years, Lewis also stood up against the mistreatment of immigrants, making a plea on the House floor to remove innocent children from cages: "That's not right, it's not fair, and it's not just," he said of undocumented children at the border. That sentiment is echoed in the work of Viri Hernandez, executive director of Arizona's Poder in Action, who came to the United States undocumented as a child and has spent her young life trying to end "the violence our communities face at the hands of police: family separation through the killing of loved ones or through deportation." She is one of many Latinas profiled in our project.
Lewis fought for economic equality through job creation. Entrepreneur Aurora James began waging a modern-day fight for economic uplift when she demanded that major retailers sell products from Black-owned businesses. See her story below.
And the work of young Lewis — the one who marched through Selma, sat at lunch counters and made a stirring call for action at the March on Washington — can be seen through the work of so many today: Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the national Black Lives Matter movement; Deja McCottrell, a young woman in Brockton, Massachusetts, who led thousands through the streets of her hometown to protest police violence; and 18-year-old Grace Jackson in Montgomery, whose stirring speech at the Alabama Capitol solidified the place of her generation in the modern-day civil rights movement. All of their stories can be found below.
The demand for equality involves change not just in the nation's approach to justice, but also in its willingness to develop new approaches to philanthropy and the arts, in housing and economic mobility, in environmental approaches to poor Black and brown communities. We organized this project by 10 civil rights themes to reflect that complexity. This also allowed us to highlight group actions like those of doctors nationwide who took a knee to protest police brutality in the wake George Floyd's death.
Who is the next great leader of change?
Ultimately, the USA TODAY Network's editors couldn't find just one person who captured the dynamism of a leader like Lewis. Instead, we carefully chose more than 30 national and local activists, business leaders, artists, politicians and public figures who encapsulate some aspect of the modern-day push for awareness and change.
We hope you agree with our picks.
More than that, we'd like to know who you would nominate as a leader of change.
Who are the unsung heroes in your family? Your community? Nominate them. Tell us who you would pick and why with this nomination form; leave a message on our Leaders of Change hotline at (240) 583-0997 or tell us on Twitter using #leadersofchange.
We may feature your nominated leader in an upcoming USA TODAY video, story or column.
Meanwhile, enjoy learning more about our choices in the interactive.
Photo by Leslie Barbaro
Dr. John Rich: co-director, Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice, Drexel University School of Public Health
When it comes to trauma, Black men have specific needs that, until John Rich's Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice, were not only going largely unmet but also unrecognized.
Rich developed a medical language and practice rooted at the nexus of police violence, emotional and social trauma and the physical wounds that can come from all three.
"So great has this mistrust for the police grown that across the country, fewer and fewer young Black people trust the police enough to cooperate with them even after life-threatening injury," Rich wrote in his Leaders of Change column.
Compound that with the mistrust of the health care system present in a lot of Black communities today, and that's a formula for long-term medical mistreatment and neglect.
"This tendency to literally 'blame the victim' when he is a Black man undermines their collective trust in the health care system, which in turn further erodes the health of the entire community."