Walking With The Wind:
A book review by Alisha Provost

When one thinks of the Civil Rights Movement the name that comes to everyone’s mind is Martin Luther King Jr., and possibly Rosa Parks. However, there were many other Civil Rights Activists who had worked right alongside those big names which in the end should get the reorganization they deserve. Walking with the Wind gives an inside look on an individual named John Lewis who may not have popped in your head at first hand but should definitely come to your mind when the topic of the Civil Rights Movement comes up.

The book Walking with the Wind starts off as John Lewis being a young boy. Lewis had grown up in Pine County. He had been born into a family that was sharecroppers. A sharecropper is someone who plants, harvests, the crop while living on someone’s land. It is more like rented out land while you are able to farm on it. The catch is that as a sharecropper you give whatever crop you have to your landlord and from that you get a certain percentage off of it. So in reality a sharecropper wouldn’t be able to pay off the debt from the landlord. This idea was what John Lewis had realized at a young age.

Growing up Lewis never liked working in the fields because he knew that it wouldn’t really get him anywhere. John Lewis wanted to get an education so that it could take him somewhere rather than following in his parents footsteps and not being able to get out of debt. At the time Lewis was able to go to school he made sure he would be at school but then when harvest time came around his parents wanted Lewis to help out in the fields. However, this was not what Lewis wanted to do so he would hide from his parents and sneak off to school. Lewis’ parents were mad however, they knew that no matter what they would try to do nothing would keep him away from getting an education. So Lewis’ mother found the college ABT up in Nashville.

Lewis first attended ABT completely focused on his education and in becoming a Minister. However, when a professor by the name of Turner came Lewis’ path would take a whole new course. Turner got together many students from ABT and they began getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement. These group of students began having mock sit ins, and would even reenact how white bystanders may react to the sit ins. The black students would have the role of the whites and the white students would be the role of the black protestors. Turner would teach the students involved how to deal with the situation nonviolently. Nonviolence would show whites that they weren’t going to have their way and it also made them even more made however that madness didn’t last that long. Once, the students had enough practice this group of students began to actually perform these sit ins in the local stores in Nashville.

The group would go into the store and walk up to the counter that only whites were allowed at and they would just sit down. As soon as this happened the owners would tell them they can’t eat here but no one would leave. The owners finally began to get smart and they would just turn off the lights and walk out. Yet again no one moved away from the counter. These sit ins kept going until all stores allowed blacks to sit at their counters. The next item on their list to desegregate was theaters. Some theaters allowed blacks to sit in the balcony while some didn’t allow any blacks inside at all. So Turner’s group of students began sitting in these theaters until the owners finally realized that they were losing business and let blacks sit freely in the theater. This group later became know as the organization SNICK.

SNICK and many other organizations then made their way to what is called Freedom Rides. Freedom Rides would be where blacks and white supporters would ride on a bus into the Deep South where segregation still prevailed even though there were laws against it. Once they got to the terminals the black passengers would walk into the white bathrooms, water fountains, or even buy a ticket in a white line. This made many whites extremely mad so violence began to happen at these terminals. Many arrests were being made, one bus got blown up, mobs would attack the passengers when they got off the bus, ect.

Snick then began to grow with the younger generation; however the younger generation wanted to act out violently rather than through nonviolence. So Lewis and other Snick members had to train the younger generation to protest nonviolently. At this time the movement began to focus more on Voting Rights over the Freedom Rides. The idea of focusing on voting rights had initially come from the Federal Government which in return made many Snick members spectacle. As the drive for voting rights increased so did the violence.

When I first started reading this book I thought that it would be boring because it had a lot of details about how John Lewis was growing up. It wasn’t until Lewis began to participate in the Civil Rights Movement did the book start to get interesting. Lewis’ viewpoint was astounding. No matter what kind of pain he went through he acted as if nothing had happened to him. He kept pushing forward. There was one point when it seemed like he was doing more than Martin Luther King Jr. but yet again he wasn’t involved in the movement as long as King had been. Unlike King no one wanted him dead yet and he also wasn’t on probations for being in jail. However, Lewis is worth knowing about because he kept fighting when he didn’t have any support behind him and when his health was at risk. This book is worth reading about because it gives you great detail on the violence that happened during the Movement.