Walking with the Wind

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Freedom Ride”

Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “This Is the Students”

In the spring and summer of 1960, the SNCC’s central committee “began mapping out a campaign that would begin the next school year, aimed at the restaurants beyond downtown, at movie theaters, at segregated hotels and grocery stores” (115). They also launched a Nashville voter registration drive in May 1960, which was the precursor to the much larger drives that would happen two years later in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. This campaign was successful—400 Black residents registered to vote.

While Nashville’s department stores were now desegregated, “the rest of the city’s businesses remained as racially divided as ever” (121). The Nashville student leaders extended their targets to fast-food grills and cafeterias, including Burger Boy, Candyland, B&W, Tic-Toc, and Krystals, as well as movie theaters. Lewis recalls one incident at Krystals where he almost died. The manager locked Lewis and Bevel in the burger joint and turned on a fumigator filled with insecticide. Firemen eventually rescued Lewis and Bevel, but this incident illustrated that “the stakes were going to keep rising in the struggle” (123).

Several weeks after this incident, the US Supreme Court ruled on a case called Boynton v. Virginia, which made segregation at all interstate transportation facilities, including bus terminals, illegal. However, it was clear that the federal government would not enforce this new law in the South for fear of political backlash among powerful Southern politicians. The Nashville student leaders began discussing how they could test this new federal ban, deciding that they wanted to ride the bus from Nashville to Birmingham, Alabama.

Bernard and Lewis wrote to Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a longtime minister and civil rights leader in Birmingham, who wrote back that the plan was too dangerous. Undeterred, Lewis submitted an application to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)’s Freedom Ride 1961 campaign, which was doing what the Nashville students hoped to do: testing desegregation in interstate facilities. The campaign accepted Lewis as a volunteer, sending him a one-way bus ticket from Nashville to Washington, DC.

Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “Last Supper”

In DC, Lewis met the 12 other original Freedom Riders, including James Farmer, the architect and leader of this ride. The Freedom Riders spent several days training, learning about nonviolent practices, local and state laws they would encounter along their route, and their rights under the newly minted law. In accordance with the Gandhian principle of informing authorities about planned civil disobedience acts, Farmer wrote letters to several key figures, including President John F. Kennedy, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the director of the FBI, the chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the presidents of Trailways and Greyhound bus companies. None responded.

Farmer made the last evening meal prior to the start of the Freedom Rides special. One of the Freedom Riders joked that “this might be our Last Supper” (135). They all understood the gravity and dangers of this campaign, with several participants even writing wills.

On the morning of May 4, 1961, the original 13 Freedom Riders—six White people and seven Black people—left Washington, DC. One group (including Lewis) traveled on a Greyhound bus, and the other on a Trailway bus. Lewis’s group traveled through Virginia and North Carolina without drawing much public notice. The first violent incident occurred in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on May 12. Due to attention brought to their town by a “jail-in” that the SNCC helped publicize, Rock Hill’s residents were already angry with the student arm of the CRM. A group of White men viciously attacked Lewis and Albert Bigelow, a White man and World War II veteran, when they attempted to enter the Rock Hill Greyhound terminal’s “‘WHITE’ waiting room” (137). Police officers intervened, with one asking Lewis and Bigelow if they wanted to press charges. Both said no. Their refusal was another aspect of the Gandhian principle, which viewed the struggle as against a system rather than a group of individuals. Media coverage of the attack on Lewis and Bigelow helped draw attention to the Freedom Riders campaign.

Lewis split from the Freedom Riders to travel to Philadelphia where he accepted a service mission to India with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization devoted to service, development, and peace programs around the world. While Lewis was away, the Freedom Riders made it successfully to Atlanta, Georgia, where they had dinner with Dr. King, who warned, “You will never make it through Alabama” (140). He was right. An angry mob of two hundred people attacked and then bombed the Greyhound bus when it first arrived in Anniston, Alabama on May 14, 1961. Newspapers in the US and around the world carried a front-page photograph of the bus in flames and the bloodied students. This attracted national and international attention to the Freedom Riders campaign and to the state of race relations in the country.

The violence did not end with the attack on the Greyhound bus. After the Trailway bus broke away from the mob in Anniston and headed to Birmingham, local Ku Klux Klan members brutally beat the remaining Freedom Riders at the Trailways terminal in Birmingham. One Freedom Rider, Dr. Bergman, was beaten so bad that “he sustained permanent brain damage and a stroke that would paralyze him for the rest of his life” (142). Lewis found out later that the Ku Klux Klan had planned this attack.

Due to the severity of the May 14 attacks, Farmer called off the rest of the Freedom Rides, but the Nashville branch of the SNCC decided to continue.

Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Mr. Greyhound”

Lewis details the continuation of the Freedom Rides. At the Birmingham Greyhound terminal, Bull Connor, Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner who strongly opposed the CRM, met Lewis and the other nine student riders. He arrested the Freedom Riders for their “own protection” (148), drove the group to the border of Alabama and Tennessee, and left them in Klan territory around midnight. After the group walked several miles, an elderly Black couple sheltered them until Diane Nash sent a car to take them back to Birmingham where they met with 11 other students, including Bernard: All 21 planned to take a bus that afternoon to Montgomery.

An angry mob met Lewis and the rest of the students at the Birmingham Greyhound terminal. Greyhound initially could not find a driver for the bus, so the students stayed in the terminal overnight. After Attorney General Kennedy negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson and the Greyhound bus company to secure state protection for the Freedom Riders and a driver, the rides resumed on May 20. Birmingham police escorted the bus to Montgomery city limits, where they promptly abandoned it. The Montgomery Greyhound terminal initially looked abandoned, but when the bus pulled in, a White mob appeared and attacked Lewis, the other riders, and the press with “every makeshift weapon imaginable” (155). One of the mob participants slammed a Coca-Cola crate against Lewis’s head, knocking him unconscious.

The Montgomery police commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, eventually broke the mob up and put an injunction on the rides. Lewis and the other injured riders were taken to doctors and then to the home of Reverend Solomon Seay, a local minister who had emerged as a leader of the CRM in the city. In court, Lewis convinced a judge to lift the injunction on the rides “by stating that we had begun this ride to see that the law was carried out, and we wanted to continue it for the same reason” (163).

Attorney General Kennedy wanted the rides to stop and issued a statement calling for a “cooling-off” (164) period. Lewis and the other Freedom Riders did not adhere to his request. They felt stopping would be disastrous for the CRM. The group continued to Jackson, Mississippi, where they arrived on May 24, 1961. After the police arrested Lewis and the other riders for attempting to use Whites-only facilities, the riders refused bail and food and water. They kept their spirits up through song. A judge sentenced the group to 60 days in Parchman Farm, the maximum-security penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. Lewis and the others were eventually released. Lewis described the experience as “hell” (172). He now knew his calling was not to go on to India but to stay and fight for human rights in the US.

Part 3 Analysis

As Lewis describes his experiences with nonviolent direct action, he expands on his belief that this philosophy is more than a means to an end. After Farmer calls off the rest of the Freedom Rides in the face of the bus bombings and horrific beatings, his decision shocks Lewis and other student leaders: It defies “the most basic tenets of nonviolence action—that is, that there can be no surrender in the face of brute force or any form of violent opposition” (143). With Lewis’s leadership, the Nashville students refuse to stop the rides. In doing so, Lewis and the other student leaders do not accept the violence that is “endemic to American culture” (395). By continuing the freedom rides, they show other Americans a different means to solving major societal issues.

New issues arose and old ones simmered within SNCC and the movement. The success of the Nashville sit-ins caught national attention. Lewis and the Nashville students secured financial support and built a coalition of like-minded, nonviolent students across the country. However, they also attracted new, untrained members who would often disrupt very intentionally planned nonviolent actions, getting themselves arrested. They also often responded to the physical and violent assaults with words and fists of their own. Their behavior brought accusations from local authorities that the SNCC was riddled with outside agitators, which made it difficult for student leaders to build the support they needed within communities.

The divide between members committed to nonviolence and those fed up with this style of resistance grew. Student leaders expressed frustration with Dr. King’s adherence to peaceful protest. For example, Dr. King refused to join the ride into Mississippi because he was on probation. In frustration, students scornfully used “a phrase that would be repeated often in the coming years, a phrase used to mock Dr. King for his loftiness in the movement and for quoting the Scripture, invoking God and Jesus in terms of his own situation […] ‘De Lawd’” (164). Lewis did not view this criticism of Dr. King as fair. He understood that Dr. King carried a huge burden as the leader of the CRM. Lewis’s continued support for Dr. King would play a role in the schism between him and the original student leaders.