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  Walking with the Wind

  A Memoir of the Movement

  JOHN LEWIS

  with Michael D’Orso

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1998 by John Lewis

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Designed by Edith Fowler

  Additional photo research: Natalie Goldstein

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN 0-684-81065-4

  Article from the Jackson Daily News courtesy of

  The Clarion Ledger.

  Lyrics from “Call Me” by Aretha Franklin.

  Copyright ©1970 Springtime Music Inc. Used by

  permission.

  “Across the Lines”

  Words and Music by Tracy Chapman

  © 1988 EMI April Music Inc. and Purple Rabbit

  Music

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI

  April Music Inc.

  All Rights Reserved. International Copyright

  Secured. Used by Permission.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WHEN I DECIDED to write this book, I realized I could not rely on memory alone. During the winter of 1996, I set aside time from a very busy schedule to go back to Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Nashville. This was more than a sentimental journey. It was a precious opportunity to thank all the brave and courageous men and women who participated in a freedom movement that changed our nation and the world. My visit to these places, crucibles where so much of the history of the struggle for civil rights was forged, reminded me in a way that mere memory could not of what it was like to have lived through those years. More important, it fortified my conviction that the story of my journey through this great period in our history had to be told.

  My life as a participant in some of the most significant events in the twentieth century would not have been possible had it not been for the inspiration, influence, and friendship of Martin Luther King Jr. He will always have my gratitude and respect.

  My participation in the Movement afforded me an opportunity to meet and come in contact with hundreds and thousands of individuals whose lives shaped the arc of this story. To all of you — wherever life’s journey has taken you — thank you, and don’t give up the good fight. For those who have died, who lost their lives so others might be free, you should be honored by our country for your raw courage and patriotism. I honor you.

  I am extremely grateful to members of my family: my brothers and sisters, who have helped me in more ways than they know; my father, Eddie Lewis, a remarkable man whose memory burns brightly within me; and my mother, Willie Mae Lewis, whose sweet spirit and abiding faith in God and her family have touched my life in so many ways. I cannot thank any of them enough.

  I am deeply grateful to so many friends and colleagues for being so patient in seeing this effort through to its completion:

  My editor, Alice Mayhew, who never gave up on me; My agent, David Black, who kept telling me, “We are going to do this book, and it is going to be a book you will be proud of.

  My friends Ronald Roach and Linda Chastang, who encouraged me from the beginning; All of my colleagues and staff, who have been with me in all of my endeavors, for your support and patience:

  Don Harris, Danny Lyon, Harriett Thornton, Ora Crawley, Ethel Tyner, Elizabeth Stein, Mildred Johnson, David Potvin, Rickey Wright, Earl Swift, and Larry Copeland; and so many other individuals — too many to name here — who offered their support, friendship, and advice.

  I am more than grateful to Mike D’Orso for having patience with me. In the process of working on this book, we became more than friends — we became brothers.

  Finally, I am forever indebted to the wonderful, powerful, magnificent spirit of history. I was touched by that spirit long ago, and I have followed it ever since. I only hope and pray that my journey will continue to be blessed.

  Atlanta, Georgia

  January 27, 1998

  To my beloved wife, Lillian, and our dear son,

  John-Miles, and to the countless unsung heroes

  who cared deeply, sacrificed much, and fought

  hard for a better America.

  J.L.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Coming Up

  ONE “That Was Some Hard Times”

  TWO A Small World, a Safe World

  THREE Pilot Light

  PART Two: Nashville

  FOUR “The Boy from Troy”

  FIVE Soul Force

  SIX “Nigras, Nigras Everywhere!”

  PART THREE: Freedom Ride

  SEVEN “This Is the Students”

  EIGHT Last Supper

  NINE Mr. Greyhound

  PART Four: Snick

  TEN Raise Up the Rug

  ELEVEN “We March Today”

  TWELVE “Keep Your Stick Down”

  PART FIVE: “Uhuru”

  THIRTEEN “Feel Angry with Me”

  FOURTEEN Freedom Fighters

  FIFTEEN Into Selma

  PART SIX: Going Down

  SIXTEEN Bloody Sunday

  SEVENTEEN De-Election

  EIGHTEEN “Why?”

  PART SEVEN: Home

  NINETEEN The New South

  TWENTY Old Ghosts

  TWENTY-ONE Onward

  Index

  Praise

  PROLOGUE

  I want to begin this book with a little story. It has nothing to do with a national stage, or historic figures, or monumental events. It’s a simple story, a true story, about a group of young children, a wood-frame house and a windstorm.

  The children were my cousins: Roy Lee and Jinnie Boy, Naomi and Leslie and Willie Muriel — about a dozen of them, all told — along with my older sister Ora and my brothers Edward and Adolph. And me, John Robert.

  I was four years old at the time, too young to understand there was a war going on over in Europe and out in the Pacific as well. The grownups called it a world war, but I had no idea what that meant. The only world I knew was the one I stepped out into each morning, a place of thick pine forests and white cotton fields and red clay roads winding around my family’s house in our little corner of Pike County, Alabama.

  We had just moved that spring onto some land my father had bought, the first land anyone in his family had ever owned — 110 acres of cotton and corn and peanut fields, along with an old but sturdy three-bedroom house, a large house for that part of the county, the biggest place for miles around. It had a well in the front yard, and pecan trees out back, and muscadine grapevines growing wild in the woods all around us — our woods.

  My father bought the property from a local white businessman who lived in the nearby town of Troy. The total payment was $300. Cash. That was every penny my father had to his name, money he had earned the way almost everyone we knew made what money they could in those days — by tenant farming. My father was a sharecropper, planting, raising and picking the same crops that had been grown in that soil for hundreds of years by tribes like the Choctaws and the Chickasaws and the Creeks, Native Americans who were working this land long before the place was called Alabama, long before black or white men were anywhere to be seen in those parts.

  Almost every neighbor we had in those woods was a sharecropper, and most of them were our relatives. Nearly every adult I knew was an aunt or an uncle,

  Prologue 12

  every child my first or second cousin. That included my un
cle Rabbit and aunt Seneva and their children, who lived about a half mile’ or so up the road from us.

  On this particular afternoon — it was a Saturday, I’m almost certain — about fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. 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. I had already seen what lightning could do. I’d seen fields catch on fire after a hit to a haystack. I’d watched trees actually explode when a bolt of lightning struck them, the sap inside rising to an instant boil, the trunk swelling until it burst its bark. The sight of those strips of pine bark snaking through the air like ribbons was both fascinating and horrifying.

  Lightning terrified me, and so did thunder. My mother used to gather us around her whenever we heard thunder and she’d tell us to hush, be still now, because God was doing his work. That was what thunder was, my mother said. It was the sound of God doing his work.

  But my mother wasn’t with us on this particular afternoon. Aunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she herded us all inside.

  Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. Small and surprisingly quiet. All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier, outside, had stopped. The wind was howling now, and the house was starting to shake. We were scared. Even Aunt Seneva was scared.

  And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a comer of the room started lifting up.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.

  That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the comer of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.

  And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.

  More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.

  It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams-so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran

  Prologue 13

  away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the comer of the house that was the weakest.

  And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.

  And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.

  But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again.

  And we did.

  And we still do, all of us. You and I.

  Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me- not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole.

  That is the story, in essence, of my life, of the path to which I’ve been committed since I turned from a boy to a man, and to which I remain committed today. It is a path that extends beyond the issue of race alone, and beyond class as well. And gender. And age. And every other distinction that tends to separate us as human beings rather than bring us together.

  That path involves nothing less than the pursuit of the most precious and pure concept I have ever known, an ideal I discovered as a young man and that has guided me like a beacon ever since, a concept called the Beloved Community.

  Let me tell you how I came to understand that concept, how it ushered me into the heart of the most meaningful and monumental movement of this American century, and how it might steer us all where we deserve to go in the next.

  Let me tell you about my life.

  PART ONE

  Coming Up

  Coming Up 14-17

  CHAPTER ONE

  “That Was

  Some Hard Times”

  I TOOK A DRIVE not long ago, south out of Atlanta, where I’ve made my home for the past three decades, down into Alabama to visit my mother and brothers and sisters. It’s a drive I make several times a year, for a birthday, a holiday or simply whenever I feel drawn back to my roots.

  On this particular occasion, the 104th session of Congress had just adjourned. It was late September 1996, little more than a month before election day. My Democratic colleagues in the House and I had done our best to hold Newt Gingrich’s feet to the fire, trying to force Brother Newt to answer the questions raised by a committee’s investigation into the ethics of some of his outside activities — specifically his role and rewards as a college instructor and as a writer of books.

  The floor debate over that investigation had extended the session two days longer than it was scheduled. By the time I boarded a Saturday-night flight home from Washington to Atlanta — a commute I make almost every weekend — I was exhausted. My wife, Lillian, was waiting up for me when I arrived home from the airport. As usual, all it took was a good night’s sleep and I was refreshed and ready to go, up at 5 A.M. By six I was behind the wheel of my Pontiac and headed south on Interstate 85 on a bright, gorgeous fall morning, the skyline of Atlanta growing smaller in my rearview mirror as the countryside around me turned rural and green.

  An hour later I was approaching the Alabama state line, which I’ve crossed more times during the past forty years than I can count. Take away the six-lane interstate highway, the billboards, the occasional suburban development where a farm used to be and, of course, the fast-food restaurants, and not much has changed here since the 1950s. Pine trees, peanut fields and broken-down barns crawling with kudzu — this is the same scenery I saw when I was a teenager riding a bus north to Tennessee to begin college in 1957, the same scenery that, in the ’60s, formed the backdrop for so many midnight drives from one small Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia town to the next, four or five of my SNCC brothers and sisters and I crammed into an old sedan, everyone but the driver asleep on each other’s

  Coming Up 18

  shoulders, soul music drifting out of the AM radio as we headed for a meeting the next morning. Or a march. Or a voter registration rally Or, too tragically often, a funeral.

  This is a drive I measure not just in minutes or miles, but in memories. When I finally exit the interstate, an hour or so into Alabama, turning toward the town of Tuskegee, I remember Sammy Younge, a SNCC colleague, a twenty-one-year-old veteran just out of the Navy who was shot to death here thirty years ago, shot in the back of the head outside a Standard Oil gas station for trying to use a “whites only” rest room.

  That Standard Oil sign is long gone — it’s a Chevron station now-but just about everything else in Tuskegee still looks much the same: the tired town square covered with weed-eaten grass and its statue of a Confederate veteran proudly facing south; the Goodwill Store with a hand-lettered sign in the window that reads THE POWER OF WORK — this in a county with one of the highest unemployment figures in the state; the tree-shaded antebellum homes at the center of town, once so grand but now mostly empty and boarded up; the Burger King off Route 29, with its painting of Booker T. Washington hanging above the front counter, honoring the man who founded Tuskegee Institute back in 1881 and who, by the turn of the century, had become vilified and ridiculed by his own people for working so closely with white America.

  It’s haunting to pas
s through Tuskegee, to cross the tiny two-lane bridge south of town and come upon a small wood-frame building by the side of the road, no more than a shack really, at the edge of a field, and to remember when that shack was a hot nightspot, Club 29 it was called, back in the ’60s, when my fellow SNCC staffers and I would often stop in on one of our late-night trips for a cold drink and some music from one of the best jukeboxes in the state, a welcome break from the grind of our journey, our mission.

  No one today would dream that that weed-covered hut was once a bright, happy place — not unless they had been there. The same with the Hardee’s restaurant in downtown Union Springs, a half hour farther down the road, where a sign stuck in the grass outside lets customers know they can buy a hamburger and a milkshake and register to vote while they’re at it. It seems like only yesterday that people my color were spat on and beaten if we even stepped into a restaurant like that. As for registering to vote, well, you were taking your life into your hands if you tried to do that back then. Who could have dreamed we would one day be able to do both at the same time, in the same place?

  By the time I cross into Pike County, getting close to home now, the time warp is complete. Now the echoes reach back beyond the movement, to the years of my boyhood. I pass through a place called Saco — just a couple of dusty warehouses by the side of the road — and think back to forty years ago, in the early 1950s, when this was a busy center of commerce. Farmers from miles around would bring their cotton here to have it ginned. Every Saturday. during picking season, my father would put my brothers Adolph and Edward and me in the truck