The case in Lewis’s favor is his legitimately brave and heroic time as a civil-rights leader in the 1960s, which included being arrested dozens of times, co-organizing the 1963 March on Washington, and, most famously, being beaten by Alabama police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965. If Lewis had died before he entered Congress in 1987, his would be an American life worth honoring. Indeed, National Review editorialized in honor of that life in 2020, and rightly so.

But it is not so easy to ignore Lewis’s career in politics, and the Postal Service doesn’t try; its announcement of the stamp cites his time in Congress, which it characterizes merely as “steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s,” and it chose for his image a photograph of Lewis from 2013. No word is offered as to the uglier side of his career in partisan politics, in which he did much to create today’s bitter and paranoid political climate.

Today, whatever hysterical claims you may hear from Joe Biden and other fringe figures, there is no “Jim Crow 2.0.” Voting is easier and more widespread than ever before, and black turnout in Lewis’s native Georgia keeps breaking historic records, including in the just-completed race for a Georgia Senate seat between two black men. By contrast, we are constantly told by liberals — and not entirely without reason — that the big challenge to democracy after 2020 is attacks on the legitimacy of our elections by “election deniers” such as Donald Trump.

Yet, on this very issue, Lewis was a persistent wrongdoer.