All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier, outside, had stopped. Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore I was terrified…Īunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she herded us all inside. In the prologue to his memoir, Lewis tells a story from his childhood to describe his vision of how we can face profound challenges and make a better world.īout fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. He later became a US congressman and a prominent voice for human rights and justice around the world. and became a key leader of the civil rights movement in the United States. While that participation may take many forms, one thing is constant: in an imperfect world marked by suffering and injustice, there will always be occasions to act.Īs a young student, John Lewis worked with Dr. Kennedy said of Lewis, “John tells it like it was…Lewis spent most of his life walking against the wind of the times, but he was surely walking with the wind of history.The readings in this chapter and throughout this book encourage us to think about our choices as individuals, as members of a community, and as participants in a democracy.

In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis’s vision and perseverance altered history. Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. Lewis’s leadership in the Nashville Movement-a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville using sit-in techniques based on the teachings of Gandhi-set the tone for major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Lewis’s adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement’s most charismatic and courageous leaders. In 1957, a teenaged boy named John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama for Nashville, the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America. Told by John Lewis, who Cornel West calls a “national treasure,” this is a gripping first-hand account of the fight for civil rights and the courage it takes to change a nation. An award-winning national bestseller, Walking with the Wind is one of our most important records of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Walking with the Wind by John Lewis