Walking with the Wind

One of the central through-lines of Lewis’s memoir is that “each generation stands on the shoulders of the previous one” (494). To him, “this is the way we move ahead, as individuals, as families and as a nation” (494).

Through backbreaking labor and in the face racial violence and segregation, previous generations paved the way for the CRM. Lewis gives the example of his own family: Over a lifetime of, Lewis’s great-grandfather, Frank Carter, worked his way up to sharecropping arrangement in which he “owned his own mules and equipment and paid a preset amount of money to rent the farm” (13); Lewis’s parents built on this, buying their own land. Lewis credits his parents with his strength, and argues that because many civil rights leaders came from similar backgrounds, the strength of their ancestors collectively gave them spirit. To Lewis, “Nothing can break you when you have the spirit” (11).

Lewis calls the brave members of the previous generation the unsung heroes of the CRM. These men and women played a fundamental role in the movement, though their contributions do not often make the history books. Septima Clark, whose father had been enslaved in South Carolina, taught Black women sharecroppers with little formal education to read, as a first step toward becoming voters. Beulah Hardge, who lived in Nashville her whole life, made sandwiches and helped raise money for the student protestors during the Nashville sit-ins. David Hall, who worked for a housing project as a maintenance manager, offered his 80 acres to protestors to pitch their tents on the first night of the Selma-to-Montgomery March. When asked whether he feared retaliation from the White community, he answered simply, “The Lord will provide” (358).

Older leaders like Dr. King and Jim Lawson also moved the needle toward a fairer and more just society. They inspired a younger generation of individuals like Lewis to take their place and fight for human rights. Lewis connects first hearing Dr. King preach and his future involvement in the movement. Dr. King’s message of applying Christian ethics to dismantle social injustices resonated deeply with Lewis: For the first time, he felt that someone was giving voice to his frustrations and feelings about segregation in the American South.

Lewis’s strong belief in the debt we owe to those who came before us led him to oppose Clarence Thomas’s 1991 nomination to the Supreme Court. Thomas’s conservatism was not the issue for Lewis. Rather, Lewis found it appalling that Thomas could call the Brown v. Board of Education decision misguided—how could someone who had directly benefited from the men and women of the CRM who fought so hard, “now […] deny others the kind of opportunities he enjoyed” (495). After all, without Brown v. Board of Education, Thomas would not have been able to pursue a career in law in the first place.