James A. Lewis is U.S. attorney for the Central District of Illinois and was a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the early part of his legal career. At Lincoln Library last week he spoke at length about his experiences. “I went to southwest Mississippi in early 1965 and spent a year as a civil rights worker, working with young people, working with the community, working on voting rights,” he recalls. Lewis was arrested three times during direct action confrontations during this period. After finishing law school in 1966 he represented civil rights workers, worked on voting rights and eventually ran a legal services program in Oxford, Mississippi, as well as helping to desegregate schools, staying in Mississippi for several years working on issues of social justice, economic justice and constitutional law.

James Lewis is vehement that there is still much work to do. As for solutions, he recommends looking at the issue from multiple angles. “We can look at [the state of race relations in the U.S.] as a question of education: are we really providing equal education opportunities to the students who really need it? We can look at it as a question of employment, which very often follows on what is your educational base: are we really opening up employment as we should be? And we can look at it as a question of criminal justice – which is what I am involved in for a living: Have we not over-criminalized certain things and do we have sufficient opportunities for people after they have been held accountable and completed their sentence and it is time for them to reenter society? Do we help them reenter so that they become productive or do we fence them off so that we, perhaps unintentionally, increase the chance that they will fail and return to prison?

“We have been struggling in this country since the beginning of slavery in 1619,” he asserts. “The nature of the struggle changes but we are still struggling.”