Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement Book

This is a memoir by Congressman John Lewis dealing mostly with his experiences as a civil rights leader in the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This is an outstanding history of a difficult time in American history, the Civil Rights Era, that, sadly, is increasingly forgotten or diminished in the minds of succeeding generations.

John Lewis grew up in a large family in southern Alabama in grinding poverty. A very, very tough upbringing in a sharecropper family whose way of life and agricultural methods had changed little from the Civil War, even though it was in the 1940s. Infrastructure was primitive and education for black youth was poor, both due to the demands of sharecropper farming and due to Alabama's low funding for black education. It's a way of life that toughened the young John Lewis and made him esteem education as well as motivate him to desire a better way for his fellow black citizens.

After graduating from high school, Lewis went to a Baptist seminary with the aim of becoming a preacher, but soon became involved with other students who would form SNCC.

If great civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy. Thurgood Marshall, and others were the generals of the movement, it was men like Lewis who would be its platoon leaders and foot soldiers '- the ones who would put into practice the principles of nonviolence and peaceful civil disobedience and who would be the very first ones to feel the blow from police clubs, the sting of tear gas, the bite of police dogs. This is where the value of this memoir truly is.

While avoiding self-promotion, Lewis tells the story of what this was like for those at the front lines of ending Jim Crow in the South. It is an amazing story of courage, love, and incredible patience because, notwithstanding the gross injustice and cruelty with which they were treated by white southern authorities and citizens, SNCC volunteers and individual black citizens never wavered in these qualities. In so doing, they captured the imagination of an America that had been previously indifferent to the plight of black Americans.

I was particularly moved by Lewis' account of his experiences as a Freedom Rider '- in which SNCC sought to exercise the right of interstate bus travel mandated by Federal court order but ignored and unenforced in the South. In this Lewis and his companions were very nearly beaten to death by an angry mob as well as having their bus burned, almost with them being trapped inside.

With each success, SNCC grew with more volunteers of all races, many from outside the South. In addition, whilst before many members of SNCC were either seminarians or of a religious background, these new members would, over time, change the nature of SNCC profoundly.

As the struggle dragged on, some results were made, but grudgingly and slowly. Some began to question the effectiveness of MLK's nonviolence. Two events would weaken the integrationist and nonviolent portions of the movement: the 1964 Democratic National Convention and "Bloody Sunday " in Selma. The state Democratic Parties in the South were whites only, and their delegations reflected that. SNCC and the SCLC worked to send a rival "Democratic Freedom Party" that had a delegation elected by black voters that had illegally been kept from voting. Despite all the work these had done, in contesting for credentials at the 1964 Convention, the national Democratic Party at the behest of LBJ double crossed them, seating the segregationists instead. In doing so, moderate black leaders like MLK and Lewis were discredited '- working within the system, following the rules seemed like a fool's errand ' and black separatist demagogues such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael gained increasingly large followings in the Movement.

In 1965, SNCC and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) continued efforts to register blacks to vote, facing bitter resistance especially in Mississippi and Alabama. That year, black citizens chose to march peacefully to the courthouse in Selma, only to be blocked and then attacked by the police. In this attack, Lewis sustained a fractured skull after a severe beating from a trooper as well as many other demonstrators being wounded or killed in this atrocity. It outraged the nation, and finally Congress and the President acted with new civil rights legislation.

But it was too late. The black power wing would point again and again to Bloody Sunday as well as other injustices and now they had the initiative. MLK, himself, was being called "Uncle Tom" . And so was Lewis, the man whose body bore the marks and damage from numerous police beatings by this time. Stokely Carmichael replaced Lewis as SNCC's chairman, would change SNCC so much that wags began referring to it as the "Nonstudent Violent Coordinating Committee", would purge SNCC of its white members, and run it into the ground.

Nevertheless, Lewis left SNCC, no longer able to abide its racial divisiveness and hatred under its new radical leadership, and built a new direction in his life, one that would lead eventually to his election as a congressman in Georgia.

While I cannot agree with all of Lewis's policy ideas for today and think his notion of applying the nonviolence that worked in the Civil Rights Movement to foreign and national security policy to be dangerously naive, I do believe he is a man of conviction, integrity, honor, and courage. I highly recommend this book for anyone desiring to learn more on the Civil Rights Movement, and am glad I added it to my reading list when I choose Civil Rights Era as my reading topics for 2019!