Lewis seemed to understand that his new vocation would sometimes require a certain amount of ruthlessness. In 1988, when Jesse Jackson was running for President, Lewis declined to endorse him, using a version of the argument he would make twenty years later. “We’ve gone through the days of protest and now it’s time to make a contribution to the Party,” he said.
His own contributions to the Party tended not to consist of granular policy analysis. Greenberg says that a number of Lewis’s friends and colleagues in Washington reached the same conclusion: “He’s not much of a legislator.” Unlike most legislators, though, he was someone people cared about—a 1991 Times profile described him as “something of a celebrity, frequently stopped and praised by tourists and passers-by.” In fact, Lewis was not merely a celebrity; he was widely and justifiably viewed as “one of the great moral heroes of our time,” as his fellow-congressman Barney Frank once put it. That kind of reputation could be an effective political weapon, especially for topics that could be linked to civil rights. “Now, more than ever before, we need the Civil Rights Act of 1991,” he said, addressing President George H. W. Bush, who was initially hesitant to support the bill. The law made it easier for employees to pursue discrimination cases; when Bush expressed concern that it might create a system of de-facto racial quotas, Lewis replied that, by using the word “quota,” Bush was “fanning the flame of division.” Bush signed the bill.
Lewis was often led by his moral intuition: he was an early supporter of gay rights, and a lifelong supporter of Israel. Mainly, though, his presence in Washington helped to solidify the relationship between the civil-rights movement and the Democratic Party. He used his political capital to make sure that the story of the movement would be remembered, and memorialized: in every session of Congress, starting in 1988, Lewis co-sponsored a bill to create a National Museum of African American History & Culture, and he was there when the museum finally opened, in 2016. The cause of civil rights had been controversial when Lewis was a young man, and of course many of the segregationists he faced down were fellow-Democrats. But, as the movement became more popular in retrospect, the Democrats’ identification with it became an important political asset. Part of Lewis’s job was to remind voters that, on one of the defining political issues of the twentieth century, his team had been on the right side. When Lewis spoke out in favor of gun restrictions or Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he spoke in the language of civil rights, suggesting that this new struggle was like that old one, and that his current political opponents were also destined to wind up on the wrong side of history.