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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 6: “Going Down”

Part 6, Chapter 16 Summary: “Bloody Sunday”

The “final act for the movement as [Lewis] knew it” (361) was the March from Selma to Montgomery. On March 7, 1965, Lewis and Hosea Williams, a protest organizer for the SCLC, co-led the march, which began at a local downtown church. Many of the participants had come from church and were wearing church clothes. Lewis wore “a suit and tie, a light tan raincoat, dress shoes and my backpack” (337).

Lewis and the other protest organizers did not expect much trouble from local and state authorities. However, a massive state trooper presence stopped the over 600 marchers as they began to walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis was frightened—he could not swim. The troopers gave marchers two minutes to turn around and go back to the church. Lewis notes, “We couldn’t go forward. We couldn’t go back. There was only one option left that I could see. ‘We should kneel and pray,’ I said to Hosea” (339-340). After only one minute, the police advanced on the crowd with bullwhips, clubs, and tear gas. The state troopers chased men, women, and children gasping from tear gas over the bridge and beat them mercilessly. The police beat Lewis so badly that he thought he was dying. The media captured the violent assault on the peaceful marchers. The footage aired that evening, shocking 50 million Americans who had originally tuned into television to watch the long-waited premier of “Judgement at Nuremberg,” a movie about the brutality of the Nazi regime and the moral culpability of individuals who did not speak out against their actions. This infamous day became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The events of Bloody Sunday affected Americans in a way that no other protest had before. Protests and sit-ins erupted across the country. Selma activists and Dr. King planned another march, but a federal judge issued a restraining order prohibiting it, lifting it when after Lewis and other organizers and participants provided testimony about Bloody Sunday. The new march had National Guard protection and took four days to get to Montgomery. Lewis states that, “There was never a march like this one before, and there hasn’t been one since” (359).

Part 6, Chapter 17 Summary: “De-Election”

The fragmentation of the SNCC continued. Lewis deeply disagreed with the organization’s “shift away from nonviolence toward militancy and Black nationalism” (379). His involvement with the organization came to a head at the 1966 annual SNCC meeting in Nashville. Lewis decided to run for chairman one more time because he felt “the very future of SNCC was on the line” (381). He did not want to see the organization veer away from its founding principles of nonviolence and support of an interracial community.

Stokely Carmichael and several other SNCC members ran against Lewis. During the open discussion portion of the election, Lewis spoke about keeping White activists as members of the organization. Several SNCC members rebuked Lewis for this comment. They also attacked his religious affiliation, his allegiance to Dr. King, and his visits to college campuses, especially primarily White campuses. The attacks became bitter and mean. Around midnight, they took a vote; Lewis won re-election. However, after Worth Long challenged the election, another vote occurred despite half of the organization having gone to bed, and Lewis lost to Carmichael.

Part 6, Chapter 18 Summary: “Why?”

Two pivotal events shaped not only the CRM of the 1960s, but also the American psyche for decades to come. The first was the assassination of Dr. King. On April 3, 1968, Dr. King gave his last speech at a Masonic temple in downtown Memphis. One year before this speech, Dr. King had given what Lewis considered his greatest speech, denouncing the Vietnam War. Since that anti-war speech, Dr. King faced constant threats on his life. An anonymous tip warned him not to make the Memphis speech. To Lewis, the speech Dr. King made in Memphis sounded like a farewell. Dr. King was assassinated the next day. This news stunned and devastated Lewis. He clung to “the thought that, Well, we still have Bobby Kennedy. We still have hope” (413).

The second event was the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Lewis joined Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, having held him in high regards for his actions on racial justice. On June 5, 1968, shortly after winning the Democratic primary in California, Kennedy was shot and killed. Lewis remembers collapsing to the floor, crying, and asking “Why?” (415).

Part 6 Analysis

The schism between Lewis and SNCC reached a point of no return. While staying in a hospital in Selma due to his fractured skull, Lewis reflected on the events and opinions that put him at odds with the rest of SNCC. He believed that “my feelings and philosophy about the movement, about our strategies and tactics, my commitment to nonviolence, my loyalty to Dr. King were all increasingly putting me at odds with many of my SNCC colleagues” (349). Lewis understood that they were sick of the system that continued to fail them, and believed nonviolence was not helping them make progress to end racial violence in the American South. His understanding did not lead him to accept their viewpoints—Lewis still believed that nonviolence was the best path forward. The brutality that met the nonviolent march in Selma galvanized the country in a way that no other CRM event had done before. It also inspired Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This showed that American society was changing, albeit slowly.

Unfortunately, new, louder, more militant members of SNCC wanted to push Lewis out of the organization. They did so in 1966 when they de-elected Lewis and elected Stokely instead. The actions that night by SNCC members deeply hurt Lewis and took him years to come to terms with. But that night was even worse for the organization. Wounds opened that night that never healed because members turned their backs on what the organization stood for. During a voting rights march through Mississippi a month after the SNCC election, Carmichael expressed the organization’s new political ideology—“Black Power” (388). SNCC renounced nonviolence and embraced militancy and Black separatism.

Lewis believes the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy left a tender wound on the American public’s psyche. To Lewis, these deaths ended the public’s ability to follow, believe in, and love leaders. Lewis points to the rise of flawed figures like Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam who advocates anti-Semitism and targets the LGBTQ community, as an example that even 30 years after the deaths of Kennedy and Dr. King, no great new leaders have emerged. Lewis believes it is possible for great leaders to rise, but though he thinks the American people “are starving for someone to believe in” (497), he is not sure about Americans’ capacity to embrace them.