Walking with the Wind

Lewis describes his drive from Atlanta, where he has made his home for over three decades, into Alabama to visit his family, including his mother Willie Mae Lewis. He measures the drive “not just in minutes or miles, but in memories” (4). For example, a small, abandoned, wood-framed building was once the hottest nightspot back in the 1960s, where Lewis and his fellow Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staffers would stop in on their late-night drives to grab a cold drink and listen to music from “one of the best jukeboxes in the state” (4).

He also drives by Antioch Baptist Church, which became his family’s church. The Ku Klux Klan attacked the church in 1904 as part of a whitecapping campaign—a practice in which Whites used violent tactics to force Black farmers to leave their property, which would then be seized by the attackers. According to a local newspaper account, a grand jury indicted five White men on charges that included burning the Antioch Baptist Church.

When Lewis arrives at his mother’s home, he discusses his parents. His mother says with pride that she only ever remembers working and does not remember being poor, though her family farmed most of what they ate and only bought items like flour and sugar. Since the other families she knew were also poor, everyone she knew was in the same position. Once Willie married Lewis’s father, Eddie Lewis, they both began working on the plot of land the Lewis family rented. Like many couples at that time, Eddie and Willie spent their time together in the field planting and picking cotton. At the peak of the season, they would pick 400 pounds of cotton each day for $1.40 (or 35 cents per 100 pounds). Willie describes these as “some hard times” (15) with a smile.

Lewis describes his childhood as “a small world, a safe world, filled with family and friends” (17). He did not experience segregation in his early childhood, partly because he knew so few outsiders. Besides work, the next most important thing in his family’s life was church. Lewis and his family attended church once or twice a month. For Lewis’s family and friends, church was a reprieve from the daily routine of work. It was a social event, like going to town, and a chance to see loved ones. One of the things that still inspires Lewis to this day is that the humble and hardworking people from his youth found joy despite their hardship and pain.

After church, Lewis often went to the house of Grandma Bessie, his great-grandmother, where Lewis would check her chicken nests and collect the eggs. When he was five, Lewis’s parents gave him the responsibility of taking care of his family’s chickens, a task that he credits with giving him traits that shaped his character and guided him to the Civil Rights Movement: patience, compassion, stubbornness, responsibility, and discipline. Though his parents and siblings viewed the chickens as the lowest forms of farm life, Lewis was drawn to the chickens due to their innocence and outcast status. He preached to the chickens each night, developed strategies to increase the hens’ productivity, conducted funerals for birds that died, and refused to eat the Sunday chicken dinners.

Lewis’s parents instilled in him the value of work. Willie and Eddie brought Lewis into the field when he was six years old. Even at this young age, Lewis recognized that the sharecropping system was unjust. He did not keep his opinions to himself, but “would speak out against what we were doing right there in the fields” (31). Lewis did not see a way out of the sharecropping life until he went to school.

This chapter documents Lewis’s earliest experiences with segregation. By the time Lewis was nearing the end of elementary school, he had come face to face with segregation through trips to Troy, Alabama. These memories remain painfully strong for Lewis. For example, at the local segregated movie theater, he and his friends could only sit upstairs in the balcony section (also called the buzzard’s roost), because this was the designated section for Black people, while White people sat on the main floor of the theater. Lewis felt so insulted by this experience that he stopped going to the movies. The memory of sitting in the balcony remains so strong that he still rarely goes.

Lewis was also deeply disappointed when the US Supreme Court ruling in 1954’s Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka did not change his school life. The justices ruled unanimously that the “‘separate but equal’ doctrine” (43), which kept public schools racially segregated, was unconstitutional. Despite this ruling, public schools in Alabama remained segregated.

One moment when Lewis was 15 years old changed his life: As a 10th grader, he heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a renowned social justice activist and leader of the CRM, delivering his Montgomery Bus Boycott speech. In this speech, Dr. King urges the audience at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery to continue the bus boycott campaign until they achieve their goal of ending segregation on public buses. Lewis felt that Dr. King was speaking directly to him and giving voice to his feelings and frustrations. To Lewis, the Montgomery bus boycott “was a fight, but it was a different way of fighting” (48). The 50,000 Black men and women in Montgomery were not using their fists, but “their dignity to take a stand, to resist” (48). Protesting using the philosophy of nonviolence deeply appealed to Lewis.

Inspired by Dr. King’s preaching of the social gospel, which applied Christian ethics to social reforms, Lewis began preaching in local churches just before his 16th birthday. Two days after his first sermon, the Klu Klux Klan murdered one of his relatives, a leader within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a US civil rights organization. This event cemented Lewis’s lifelong commitment to the philosophy and practice of nonviolence.

In 1957, Lewis made the seminal decision to leave Pike County to attend the American Baptist Theological (ABT) Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee. This decision placed Lewis at the epicenter of the CRM of the late 1950s and 1960s.