“I was wearing a backpack before it became fashionable to wear backpacks. And in my backpack, I had two books. I thought we were going to be arrested, and in jail, so I wanted to have something to read. I had an apple and I had an orange in the backpack, something to eat.”i
- John Lewis
I stumbled across these words from the late Congressman John Lewis on the occasion of hi death, and they struck a nerve in me. He was describing the purpose of the backpack he wore on “Bloody Sunday.” This was the day in 1965 when he was savagely beaten by Alabama State Troopers as he marched in protest with others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the pursuit of suffrage for disenfranchised minorities. Lewis was drawing a contrast between the grave, functional purpose of his backpack on Bloody Sunday with the fashion purpose backpacks often serve today. In my mind however, Lewis’ words and his reference to his backpack serve as an analogy for the contrast between the voting and civil rights protesters he helped lead in the sixties and the racial justice protesters in the streets of America right now. To put it bluntly, while the racial justice protesters today have sparked a historic inflection point, the movement lacks two key qualities that could prevent it from becoming a fleeting fashion trend.