John Lewis with Michael D’Orso
Simon and Schuster
1998
496 pages
Walking With the Wind is a memoir, by progressive US Congressman John Lewis, of a life perpetually engaged in political struggle. D'Orso and Lewis' book was named one of the "50 Books of our Times" by Newsweek magazine in 2009, and it won the Robert F Kennedy book award in 1999. Lewis is currently the elected member of the US house of Congress for the State of Georgia’s 5th district, which covers most of the city of Atlanta. As a young man Lewis was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, he worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and attained the position of Chairman to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the major organizations involved in propelling that movement forward. After the movement dissipated, Lewis entered mainstream politics, first working on the Robert Kennedy campaign for the Democratic Party primaries in 1968, and in 1977 a failed bid at a congressional seat. In 1987 Lewis won the election for the congressional seat that he currently holds.
Here is an example of the contemporary John Lewis.
Lewis’ memoir recalls his impoverished youth (he was the child of sharecroppers) and his early development of a social consciousness that compelled him to eventually struggle for civil rights. The first few chapters of the memoir begin with Lewis discussing a recent visit to a southern city, and then proceeding into his memories of the movement that pertain to that locale. This structure does not hold through the entirety of the book, but it sufficiently anchors the voice of the author in the contemporary period, in case the reader forgets. Lewis is looking back on his participation in a political movement that sucessfully changed society to the extent that he, a black man, could now hold a position of political power in the American South.
Lewis’ recalls all of the major events of the Civil Rights movement; the freedom rides, the sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, the violence, the indifference of law enforcement to the suffering of marchers at the hands of white mobs, the 1963 March on Washington DC, the tensions between black and white activists, the tensions between adherents to nonviolence and activists who advocated the use of violence and King's assassination. Lewis also recalls many of the little struggles, those that took place within the movement for individual power or for the purpose of advancing a particular shift in ideology or strategy. What makes Lewis’ book relevant to the literature on the civil rights movement is that it comes from the voice of a participant, and in particular a participant who used the momentum he gained from his participation in the movement to achieve mainstream political power in order to continue his struggle and to be a symbol of the movement’s success.
Walking with the Wind is replete with his unique thoughts on the movement events. He describes first hand the experiences of being physically attacked and then arrested by police. He discusses the speech he had prepared for that 1963 March on Washington D.C., the event at which Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” address. While Martin Luther King strongly uttering that one line has become appropriated as an iconic image of human (or perhaps merely ‘American’) potential, John Lewis delivered his own speech earlier in the day. Lewis recalls that King was among a group of men who pressured Lewis to soften his rhetoric. Such anecdotes from a high profile insider of the movement add inflection to the historical events that are commonly known as a series of images. Lewis was very critical of state power in their indifference (if not assistance) to the suffering of the American south’s black population, and furthermore he was a strict adherent to nonviolent activism (despite his frequent arrests and injuries). This strength of character pervades his memoir and colours his remembrances of interactions with individuals such as Malcolm X and his successor as SNCC chairman, Stokely Charmichael. Furthermore, Lewis’ memoir is relevant for inserting the names of forgotten activists back into the discourse of civil rights movement history.
To the extent that Lewis’ record speaks for itself, the reader of Walking With the Wind does not have to wonder whether or not the activist was, in 1998, altering his memories or his past attitudes to serve his present political career. Lewis is currently a fearless progressive politician who has fought for issues such as the prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation, and a bill supporting the right for conscientious objectors to be exempt from paying taxes towards military support.
Walking with the Wind ends with a description of Lewis’ career in mainstream politics and a list of issues that continue to plague African-American communities. An interesting aspect to this final section of Lewis’ text is that he continues to use the langauge of radical politics as a United States congressman. He makes the call to ‘agitate, agitate, agitate!’ when discussing solutions to the unresolved problems of the poor communities he serves. Lewis and D'orso's book represents the life of a man who continues to fight for the same moral good he has always struggled for, and with the same force of language and character regardless of the status he holds.
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