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 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Snick”

Part 4, Chapter 10 Summary: “Raise Up the Rug”

At a SNCC leadership workshop held in July 1961 in Nashville, Lewis and other Nashville activists heatedly debated “voting versus marching, registering versus ‘riding,’ moving beyond the direct action of protests and demonstrations to the mainstream political process of voter registration” (179). Attorney General Kennedy endorsed the voter registration campaign and promised financial support to SNCC if they shifted their focus. Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and Bernard Lafayette opposed this shift and spoke firmly in defense of sticking to SNCC’s roots at the workshop. To them, direct action had helped raise national awareness of racial violence in the American South. They did not see a compelling reason to switch focus to voter registration.

Ella Baker, a civil rights activist who organized the founding SNCC conference, proposed the creation of two SNCC branches: one led by Diane Nash and focused on direct action and the other focused on voter registration. The SNCC members accepted the compromise, though Lewis notes that they would soon learn “there was no separation between action and voter registration” (180). Voter registration was just as threatening as sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the White establishment in the American South and elicited the same level of violence. The SNCC participated in two new campaigns: voter registration in McComb, Mississippi (known as the McComb Movement), and a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia (known as the Albany Movement).

Bob Moses, an SNCC activist, led the McComb movement in 1961. To Lewis, “there was no state that showed us what we were up against more than Mississippi” (181). Herbert Lee, a local Black farmer who helped Moses register votes in McComb, was shot dead by a member of the Mississippi state legislature. The jury ruled Lee’s death a “justifiable homicide” (184) based on eyewitness testimony. A Black man who testified later confessed to Moses that Lee intimidated him into giving his testimony. Moses led a subsequent march, and he and the other participants were beaten and thrown in jail, briefly ending the McComb Movement. However, in January 1962, a coalition of civil rights groups, including SNCC, formed the Council of Federal Organizations (COFO), with Moses as director. COFO’s purpose was to bring together the various voting rights activities in Mississippi.

The Albany Movement also experienced its own troubles. The Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, learned the Gandhian method of protest to counterattack the activists. He made more arrests in Albany than had happened anywhere else in the movement up to this point. Pritchett even arrested Dr. King, who vowed to stay in jail until the city agreed to desegregation. Pritchett and city leaders initially agreed, but upon release from jail, Dr. King realized they were insincere. After the failure in Albany to desegregate the city, Dr. King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) shifted focus to Birmingham.

The Birmingham movement began in April 1963. Nash and Bevel, who had joined SCLC, started organizing student groups. In May 1963, they led the Children’s Crusade, also known as the Children’s March. The purpose of this march was for children to talk to the mayor about desegregation. On the first day, Connor’s police officers arrested 1,000 children. Connor, determined not to let the protests continue, brought out water hoses and police dogs on the second day. The attack on children shocked Americans; Birmingham city officials agreed to take steps toward desegregation, and the demonstrations stopped. That same week, the SNCC elected Lewis as their chairman.

Part 4, Chapter 11 Summary: “We March Today”

When Lewis met with other civil rights leaders and President Kennedy to discuss the March on Washington, the one leader not invited was Malcolm X, the leader of the Nation of Islam or Black Muslims. Malcolm was not considered a leader of the CRM because he did not believe in an interracial democracy. At the meeting, President Kennedy raised his concern that the march would incite more violence and prevent the civil rights bill from passing.

The march’s organizers proceeded with their plans, which included Lewis giving a speech. The summer of 1963 was a whirlwind for Lewis. He traveled throughout the South visiting various SNCC campaigns with Julian Bond, Lewis’s friend and SNCC’s communications director.

Lewis also worked on drafts of his speech with the help of Julian and others. Lewis wanted to give a strong speech that went beyond promoting a single piece of legislation. He also wanted to signal to the Kennedy administration that he and the SNCC thought the administration was moving too slowly and being too cautious on civil rights issues in the US. The final draft of the speech made clear the SNCC’s “resolve to stay in the streets, to keep on pushing, that this was a revolution taking place in the American South” (218). In fact, woven throughout the speech was the term “revolution.” They also used the image of General Sherman’s March to the Sea, a 1864 Civil War march to scare the citizens of Georgia into giving up on the Confederate cause. Similar to Sherman’s troops, the SNCC was “an army—a nonviolent army—bent on nothing less than destruction—the destruction of segregation” (219).

The night before the march, Bayard Rustin and other civil rights leaders told Lewis his speech was too radical. Even Dr. King expressed his surprise around “the section about Sherman and slicing a swath through the South. ‘John,’ he said, ‘that doesn’t sound like you’” (225). The list of objections to the speech was long, and Lewis was initially not willing to make all the changes. However, after Asa Philip Randolph stepped in, Lewis agreed to fix his speech because of his admiration and love for Randolph. The new speech satisfied Lewis because it still had bite and did not compromise the original message.

Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary: “Keep Your Stick Down”

Several events ushered in a “season of darkness” (231) for the movement and for Lewis personally. On the morning of September 15, 1963, when Lewis was visiting his family in Pike County, he received a call that a bomb killed four young girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Children had filled the church that Sunday morning because the congregation had been celebrating its annual Youth Day. On the site, Lewis “looked at the people standing on that sidewalk across the street, these black men and women of Birmingham, who had lived through so much, and I knew they had to be asking themselves, How much more? What else? What’s next?” (234). At the young girls’ funeral, Dr. King asked the Black community to not lose faith in the White community. Some White people felt terrible about the bombing, including a White Birmingham attorney named Charles Morgan, who openly shared his sense of guilt and shame saying that the entire White community was responsible for the bombing and was then forced out of the city. The bombing was a huge blow to the hope and faith of many in the CRM.

A gubernatorial election was taking place in Mississippi in November. To combat White people’s misconception that Black people did not want to vote, Bob Moses decided to hold the Mississippi Freedom Vote, a mock election in the fall of 1963. Along with Al Lowenstein, a White activist and former dean of Stanford University, Moses wanted to show Mississippians, other Americans, and the federal government that Black people would show up in large numbers to vote. SNCC members staffed the campaign, in which Black Mississippians could vote for a slate of Freedom Party candidates listed on Freedom Vote ballots alongside the actual Republican and Democratic candidates running for office. On Election Day, more than 90,000 Black Mississippians cast their ballot, demonstrating that “Black people could and would actually vote in meaningful numbers” (244). These 90,000 voters were now committed to voting for real, and the SNCC turned its focus to the next US president.

To Lewis, John Kennedy represented the best hope Black men and women had. Kennedy was the first US president to accept civil rights as a moral issue. As a result, he became a symbol of hope and change for the Black community, which was why his assassination on November 22, 1963, was so shocking. For the first time, Lewis felt lost. He cried that afternoon, as did many Black Americans who felt they had lost a friend. Five days after Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson held a joint session of Congress. The topic was the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson committed to passing in honor of Kennedy. Lewis and other SNCC members remained unconvinced that Johnson, a Southerner and a Texan, would quickly pass this legislation.

Part 4 Analysis

Youth often were at the center of CRM’s major events, and the visually arresting mistreatment they received was galvanizing. Lewis and other CRM leaders strongly believed in including children and teenagers in the movement, because “young people identify more strongly than anyone else with the whole concept of freedom” (197). Free from responsibilities like mortgages, families, children, or jobs meant young people could risk everything for a noble and deserving cause. For example, images from the Children’s March in Birmingham stunned Lewis and the nation: “snarling German shepherds loosed on teenaged boys and girls, the animals’ teeth tearing at slacks and skirts. Jet streams of water strong enough to peel the bark off a tree, aimed at twelve-year-old kids, sending their bodies hurtling down the street like rag dolls in a windstorm” (197). These images shook America, resulting in President Kennedy proposing “the most sweeping civil rights bill in the nation’s history” (199).

The movement also became more verbally aggressive. Lewis used his speaking platform at the March on Washington, DC, to call the nation’s attention “to the ugliness and violence and suffering” (205) occurring in the South and to confront politicians for their continued inaction in dealing with racial violence. Lewis’s ferocious and aggressive speech was a landmark event for the CRM. Conservative civil rights leaders would now more openly hold politicians accountable for their promises and failures.

However, the movement’s newfound aggressiveness also hurt it. One of the unintended consequences of the Freedom Rides was the radicalization of some activists, who rejected the discipline and care of the original Nashville student leaders in favor of increased militancy. For example, activist Stokely Carmichael, who would later immortalize the term “Black Power,” would outright dare hecklers to attack him during demonstrations. SNCC members, including Lewis, became so frustrated with him that they asked Stokely to leave Nashville. Stokely would soon become one of the loudest voices s against the involvement of White activists in the CRM. In contrast, most activists still believed in a biracial community, and Lewis “spoke out loudly and often on this issue” (193). To him, all Americans, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, must unite to truly have an interracial democracy, or Beloved Community. Lewis believed that the continued separation of various groups would result in the further fragmentation of American society.

One of the most powerful aspects of Lewis’s memoir is his memorialization of the unsung heroes of the CRM—the matriarchal heads of many households in the American South, who showed movement leaders “the way to mobilize in the towns and communities where they lived” (187). These women carried unimaginable weight due to living under horrible Jim Crow laws, yet they still found the courage and strength to fight back against segregation. One woman that Lewis gives particular attention to is Fannie Lou Hamer. A sharecropper from Mississippi, Hamer “never dreamed of doing something as daring as registering to vote” (187). Yet, she not only did that, but also ran for office herself. Hamer played a pivotal role helping Lewis and the SNCC set up voter registration drives in Mississippi, making her “a legend to anyone who knows anything about what was happening in Mississippi in the early 1960s” (188).