I just finished reading .Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis with Michael D’Orso. I must admit that until reading The Children by David Halberstam I knew little about John Lewis. I knew him as a congressman from Atlanta, a slow-talking man I had seen on TV a few times. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t terribly impressed by him. I suspect a certain latent racism or regionalism (he has a pronounced southern accent) in myself contributed to that assessment. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.
I’m a little too young to remember the peak years of the civil rights movement (I was born in 1962). Perhaps also too young for the movement to have been presented in the history texts I read in grade school with the prominence it deserves (hopefully that has been corrected).
Lewis was in the thick of things in almost every major civil rights story during the late 50s and the 60s. He was one of the organizers of the Nashville sit-ins that integrated eating establishments, movie theaters and bus terminals (Halberstam was a young newspaper reporter in Nashville at the time covering the story). That led, naturally, to the integration of interstate bus and train transportation. Lewis, again, was at the front. He was on one of the first Freedom Rides intended to integrate interstate bus service.
From there, John Lewis became involved in SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the SCLS (the organization MLK is most identified with), etc. Lewis spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, and had his skull (literally) cracked on the Edmund Pettis Bridge (that's him in the center) in Selma, AL. The list goes on.
Please do yourself a favor and read these two books. I’m in awe. John Lewis is living icon, an american treasure. John Lewis is my hero.