Reading Supplement for Walking with the Wind
by John Lewis
Before beginning, please read the following:
Although this book will read significantly faster than your other readings—it is a memoir written in an
informal and engaging style—it is quite a hefty tome. In an effort to lighten your load (figuratively, of course),
we will not read the entire memoir. In most instances, you will read entire chapters. For the first five chapters I
have created short summaries of the most important content to read in lieu of or as a supplement to the text. In
some instances, you will be asked only to read the synopses. For others, you will need to read sections of the book
(preceded by this symbol ☞) interspersed within summaries. Your syllabus has a complete list of the remaining
assignments.
You will have a few assignments that are on the long side. As you read, you will encounter stories about
Lewis’ personal life, for example discussions of his love life (or lack thereof). Read these sections more quickly.
Learning what to read with great care and what to breeze through is a crucial skill for every college student. By
reading actively (asking yourself along the way: what is the main point of this chapter, why is this event
included, and is it relevant to what you are studying in class?), you will set yourself up to make such choices
judiciously. Use this unit as an opportunity to further develop this skill.
Finally, for each reading assignment, bring to class (at least) one quotation that you think is poignant,
encapsulates an important theme, or raises issues worthy of discussion (They can be Lewis’ words or a quotation
he includes). At various times throughout the unit, I will randomly ask students to share their quote of the day
and explain why they chose them (a pop quiz of sorts—yes, I’m gonna keep track and no, you won’t have time to
search the book). Please take this responsibility seriously.
Chapter 1: “That was some hard times”
At the start of the chapter, Lewis introduces Pike County, Alabama, where he grew up, and reflects
on what it was like to be a sharecropper’s son. The county’s landscape is covered with rolling hills, forests,
and creeks. Small communities are scattered along the mostly-dirt roads. Before 1821, when Pike County
was founded, few, if any, blacks lived there. That changed dramatically in the 1820s when the area’s main
industry shifted from cattle farming to cotton production. Although cotton was produced by yeoman
farmers rather than on large plantations, many slaves were brought in as laborers. By 1850, one fifth of the
county’s residents were slaves. After the Civil War, most of the left, and those who remained were as poor
as the now free black sharecroppers. Sharecropping, he notes, “was hardly better than slavery.” (6) He
writes, “There [was] a lot of poverty in this county, and it’s a poverty that is blind to color . . . except that
whites and blacks rarely saw one another.” (6) Conditions had changed little by the time he was born in
1940. The church and poverty were the most important factors in the lives of the county residents. Even
today, he explains, “You can’t miss the poverty as you drive through rural Pike County, and neither can
you miss the churches.” (6)
As in other parts of the south, the blacks of Pike County experienced their share of racially motivated
violence. Black churches were burned and at least one instance of “whitecapping”—the practice of
threatening property-owning blacks until they abandoned their property—has been documented. Lewis’s
great-great-grandfather, Tobias Carter, had been born into slavery in Pike County. He was able to
purchase some land in 1880. After five years he sold it, Lewis presumes, because of pressure from the Klu
Klux Klan.
LewisIntro.doc 10-Jan-08
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Tobias Carter’s son, Frank, became the family patriarch, and worked at developing a little area of
Pike County that became known as Carter’s Quarters. Still, he was just a tenant farmer, working with 125
other local farmers for a white man named Josh Soules Copeland. Copeland provided Carter with a house
and land to raise cotton, corn, and potatoes. Come harvest time, the Copelands kept half of what Carter
raised in exchange for use of the land and house. This arrangement was called “working on half.” Some
farmers “worked on fourth,” which meant they only got to keep one fourth of their crop. On “Draw Day,”
the first Sunday of the month, the farmers met the landowner to be advanced credit or to pay off loans. It
also provided a special social occasion for the sharecropping families to socialize.
In 1904, Frank’s oldest son Dink married a Pike County woman named Della Ethridge. They had ten
children; the second girl was Lewis’ mother, Willie Mae. According to Willie Mae, Lewis recalls, “First,
last and in between, life on this earth—at least as she has always known it—is about work.” (14) Because
everyone she knew was poor, she never felt poor. She left school after eighth grade, and at sixteen she met
and soon married Eddie Lewis. Unable to afford a honeymoon—they had neither the time nor the
money—they simply started sharecropping after moving in with Willie Mae’s parents. Sometimes she
worked in the fields with her husband, sometimes she “worked out” for another local farmer, and
sometimes she would find a “house job” in nearby Troy. When the peak seasons of planting and picking
came around, they would work side by side from dawn until dusk, bringing in 400 pounds of cotton
together at “forty three cents a hundred.” His mother remembers, “that was some hard times.” (15) By
1934, they were renting their own “shotgun” house, with one hallway slicing through from the front door
to the back—“if a shotgun were fired through the front door screen, it would sail right out the rear.”(15)
On Feb. 21, 1940, their third child, John Robert Lewis, was born.
This was the world into which Lewis was born: a world of poverty, hard-work, tight-knit family
relations, religiosity, and segregation. Understanding this, Lewis is not surprised that change
was not something my parents were ever very comfortable with. And who could blame them? They, like hundreds
of thousands—no, millions—of black men and women of their generation, worked harder than seemed humanly
possible, under circumstances more difficult than most Americans could possibly imagine, to carve out a life for
themselves and their children in a society that saw them as less than fully human. Theirs was, as the Bible says, a
straight and narrow way. There was little room for change in the world my parents knew, and what change there
was was usually for the worse. It’s not hard to understand at all the mixture of fear and concern they both felt as they
watched me walk out into the world as a young man and join a movement aimed, in essence, at turning the world
they knew upside down. (9)
Regardless, Lewis would spend much of his life seeking such revolutionary change.
Chapter 2: A Small World, A Safe World
Despite these difficulties, Lewis has fond memories of his childhood. He notes,
For all the wounds and scars and pain that surround it, this is still home to me. My earliest memories are not of
drudgery and labor, oppression and inequality, exclusion and neglect. Those memories would take shape later, as I
grew up. But the world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one. (17)
Of course, he did not mean monetarily rich, as Lewis grew up “dirt poor” like his mother. Still, he explains, “I
didn’t realize it. It was a small world, a safe world, filled with family and friends. There was no such thing as a
stranger. I never ventured out of the woods of Carter’s Quarters . . . And outsiders rarely ventured in—especially
white people.” (17) In fact, until he was six years old, Lewis had only seen two white people: the mailman and a
traveling salesman.
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Lewis describes the modest conditions in which his family lived. Their house had two rooms and a
kitchen. Outside were an outhouse, a smokehouse, and a barn. Obviously, the house had no electricity. A
fireplace heated the home unevenly in winter. In the summer, he recalls, “You work all day, outside,
under that broiling sun, the air still as death, then you come home to a house that is hardly cooler inside .
. . even at nighttime.” (20) He writes, “More than anything else—besides work, of course . . . the most
important thing in my family’s life . . . was church.” (21) It “was an exciting place, a colorful, vibrant place
. . . a social event much like going into town.” (22)
Lewis shifts gear and tells of when his parents gave him the responsibility of taking care of the family’s
chickens. He asserts that it was this childhood moment that best provided a “glimpse into my future, a
first indication of what would come to shape my character and eventually guide me into the heart of the
civil rights movement—qualities . . . such as patience, compassion, nonviolence, civil disobedience and not
a little bit of willful stubbornness.” He notes that unlike the rest of his family, who thought that chickens
“were just about the lowest form of life on the farm,” he was always “drawn to the chickens.” “Maybe,” he
muses, “it was their outcast status, the very fact that those chickens were so forsaken by everyone else,
that drew me to them.” (24)
Raising chickens, though, was “child’s play” compared to farming, which was “dead serious business.”
(28) At age six, he first joined his parents in the fields. From spring until fall, “there was no line drawn
between the lives of the crops in those fields and our own lives.” (28) According to Lewis, “the rhythm he
understood better than any other was the tedious, grinding, monotonous rhythm of cotton.” (28) Planting
season came first. Using a mule and plow, the farmer would break new ground creating a furrow. Others
would follow, dropping seeds into the furrow. Then a spade would be used to cover the seeds. A few
weeks later, once tiny cotton shoots started breaking through the soil, chopping began. (29) He explains,
Each of us would carry a hoe out into the fields and, walking slowly through the furrows, under a sun that was
getting higher and hotter every day, with endless swarms of tiny biting black gnats nipping at the sweat around our
eyes and mouths, we would stop at each group of shoots and chop away all but the tallest, healthiest-looking one. It
was painstaking work, carefully digging around each selected plant, removing unwanted seedlings while taking great
care not to damage the chosen one. We would also dig out the weeds. (30)
Still, as bad as this step was, Lewis hated fertilizing, or “dropping soda,” more. The task required spreading a
baking-powder-like chemical over the plants by hand. As the day progressed, the process became more difficult as
sweat turned the fertilizer into a “gooey paste,” which then hardened into crystalline clumps that needed to be
broken up. “By the end of the day,” he recalls, “your hands would be swollen and sore, sliced with tiny cuts.”
Picking was even worse, according to Lewis. While seeing the cotton bloom should have been rewarding, he “saw it
instead as our punishment.” To pick the crop, the worker had to stoop down. Picking for eight to ten hours, as was
typical, would set your back “on fire. It would ache all night, and it would still be aching when you got up the next
morning to go out and do it all over again.” Furthermore, he adds, “we all came home each night with fingertips
chewed ragged and bloody by the sharp edges of those cotton pods.” (30) So tight were the families’ budgets that
they tried to pick cotton in the morning when it was still wet and therefore heavier—farmers were paid based on the
weight of their yields. The landlord would take his “share”—half of the crop outright. Then, from the other half,
he would subtract whatever the farmer owed for supplies or past loans. “What was left after all that was ours,”
which he recalls, “was never enough. Even a six-year-old could tell that this sharecropper’s life was nothing but a
bottomless pit. I watched my father sink deeper and deeper into debt, and it broke my heart. More than that, it
made me angry.” Lewis would tell his parents that their life was nothing more than “gambling.” His parents could
only reply, “What else are we going to do?” (31) Lewis had no answer, that is until he started school.
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Chapter 3: Pilot Light
☞
Read: pp. 32–35 (stop at “…I had been to Troy.”)
Lewis provides a description of Troy, Alabama, the nearest town to Carter’s Quarters. He explains
that Troy today (at the time he wrote the memoir) has changed little since his first visit as a boy. The
town square is still “dominated by its statue of a Civil War soldier. LEST WE FORGET reads the
inscription.” He continues to describe the town’s fighting spirit, noting that even after the Civil War was
over, its residents refused to surrender. Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, a Troy businessman had a
monument built in his front yard with the inscription, “IN MEMORY OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH
WHO KILLED OLE ABRAHAM LINCOLN.” While the monument is now long gone, “the sentiment
hasn’t vanished,” as demonstrated by the large number of Confederate flags one encounters throughout
Troy. (35) He points out the old Drugstore, Byrd’s, and recalls that while “Blacks were allowed to buy
anything they wanted in Byrd’s . . . they could not sit down . . . That simply was not allowed.” (35–36)
Similarly, he remembers having to sit in the balcony section of the movie theater “set aside for ‘Coloreds.’”
Even at the time, he felt it “was an insult to have to sit up there.” He also recollects the segregated
bathrooms at the bus station, “the nice clean one marked ‘WHITE,’ and the dirty, run-down one marked
‘COLORED.’” Perhaps most galling was the fact that he could not use the public library. “Even an eightyear-old,” he writes, “could see there was something terribly wrong about that.” (36) Still, Troy had a
black commercial area with businesses owned and frequented by blacks. He concludes, “By the turn of the
1950s,” when he was about ten-years-old, “the lines between black and white in the place where I lived
were becoming painfully clear to me.” (37)
These facts of life were further accentuated as he became increasingly aware of the North, “a different
place, different specifically in terms of race.” (37) He obsessed about it and often daydreamed, while
picking cotton, of living in a world “where black people were not programmed from birth to be nothing
but field hands.” (38) He learned of the North through stories of relatives who had moved there during
World War II. Ultimately, he saw it firsthand, when he visited relatives in Buffalo, New York. His uncle
Otis drove them there. He notes that they packed plenty of food, as “there would be no restaurants for us
to stop at until we were well out of the South.” Even something as simple as “stopping for gas and to use
the bathroom took careful planning.” (38) He recalls, “It wasn’t until we got into Ohio that I could feel
Uncle Otis relax.” (39)
After returning home, he saw his world in a whole new light. He was “more acutely aware than ever
of how black men and women . . . addressed all white people, even white children, as ‘Mr.’ or Mrs. or
‘Miss,’ always adding ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’ and never receiving any of these courtesies in return.” Riding the
bus to junior high only reinforced his growing anger. Unlike in white areas, the roads in black sections
weren’t paved, so during rainstorms they became impassible. Lewis remembers countless times when the
children had to get out of the bus during the downpour and put the vehicle on their shoulders to get it
back on the road. The white school bus was new, while theirs was a “rusty jalopy, an old hand-me-down,
just like our schoolbooks.” Moreover, they would often pass prison work gangs on the road, and “those
prisoners were always black . . . You couldn’t help but notice that.” (40)
Even as a child, Lewis understood that only school could help him escape this fate. His parents
agreed, and yet when farm duties called, he had to stay home from school to help with the work. Lewis
yearned to learn and even tried hiding from his parents and sneaking onto the school bus. He remembers,
“There was no stopping me.” (41)
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Indeed, this dedication reveals much about his character. He writes, “I have a very strong sense of
passion. But my passion plays itself out in a deep, patient way. . . . That’s what faith is all about . . .
patience and persistence.” He continues, people who are like “fireworks, popping off right and left . . . can
capture a crowd . . . [but] some battles are long and hard, and you have to have staying power.
Firecrackers go off in a flash, then leave nothing but ashes. I prefer a pilot light—the flame is nothing
flashy, but once it is lit, it doesn’t go out.” Soon Lewis would apply this philosophy to the cause of Civil
Rights.
He learned of the Civil Rights Movement when he was a sophomore at Pike County Training
School—the county’s only high school for black children. In the school library, he read about the Brown
decision and felt “jubilation,” believing that “everything was going to change now.” (44)
☞
Read: p. 44 (start at “All that spring…) through p. 49 (stop at “… bus to break it up.”)
Although Lewis was set on becoming a preacher, he “had problems with the church.” To be sure, he
was “committed to [his] faith,” but he could not understand why people could be so cruel, “often in the
name of the same Bible.” (50) Like King, he wanted to be a preacher who actually used the teachings of
the Bible to make the world a better place; he wanted to preach the “social gospel.”
☞
Read: p. 51 (start at “Two days after I …”) through p. 53 (stop at “… crumbled apart with age.”)
Determined to go to college, but unable to afford a school like Morehouse, Lewis enrolled at the
American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABT) in Nashville, which didn’t charge tuition. There he began
another chapter in his life.
Chapter 4: “The boy from Troy”
Arriving on campus, Lewis, recalls, “I was just a boy from the woods, nervous and unsure.” He
explains, “I felt very alone, very out of place. . . . And I was very conscious of having grown up on a poor,
rural farm.” (59) Still, the new world was exciting. The tiny dorm rooms “looked palatial.” For the first
time, he would have a bed all to himself.
☞
Read: p. 60 (start at “Toney was my …”) through the end of the chapter.
Chapter 5: Soul Force
In 1958, as Lewis started his second year at ABT, Nashville “felt like a different place than it had
been the year before. There was a sense of urgency and awareness spreading among my classmates and
friends, and indeed among black students throughout the city.” All over the continent of Africa—in Zaire,
Somalia, Nigeria and the Congo—freedom “was stirring,” and Lewis and many of his peers could not
“help being thrilled.” (71) Increasingly, they looked beyond their campus to Nashville, a progressive city
compared with much of the South, but still racially divided. While blacks sat on the city council, were
officers in the police force, and could sit alongside whites on buses, Lewis notes, “there was still
segregation. In the libraries and theaters, in public schools, in hotels and restaurants, at the lunch counters
in department stores, blacks were kept apart from whites or were entirely excluded.” (72)
Lewis describes the impact of hearing Coretta Scott King speak and taking classes from the Reverend
Kelly Miller Smith, who taught at ABT and was a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR). FOR’s dedication to “nonviolent direct action” and “passive resistance” as a means of achieving
social justice appealed to Lewis, so he attended a FOR workshop.
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☞
Read: p. 75 (start at “I said to myself …”) through p. 79 (stop at “… at Troy State University.”)
While the meetings started small, the numbers of those attending grew. Fellow ABT student Bernard
LaFayette, who would become one of Lewis’ closest friends, was one of these individuals. The more Lewis
studied and learned, the more he was drawn to this philosophy, and the more similarly minded people he
met. Lewis, LaFayette, and James Bevel (who had resisted getting involved) attended an important retreat
at the Highlander Folk School. Highlander was run by Myles Horton, “a liberal white activist who’d
spent his entire life working for social justice in every arena from labor unions to racial equality.” (80)
King, Rosa Parks, and folk singer Pete Seeger1 all visited Highlander at one time. During his visit, Lewis
singles out Septima Clark, a sixty-year-old organizer, as “the single person who most impressed” him
there. A daughter of a former slave, Clark’s specialty was organizing the grassroots—the common black
men and women who had little or no schooling. He explains, “I sensed then, and this belief would grow as
the years went on, that the lifeblood of the movement was not going to be spokesmen—the schooled,
sophisticated, savvy upper crust who might be best at speechmaking and press conferences. They would be
the leaders . . . but it was going to be the tens of thousands of faceless, nameless, anonymous men, women
and children . . .who were going to rise like an irresistible army” and create a true Civil Rights Movement.
(81)
Other individuals that Lewis met that year were already or would become important leaders in the
movement. They included Bayard Rustin, whose combined influences of Quakerism and Communism led
him to embrace radical pacifism; Ella Baker of the NAACP, who became a crucial organizer of student
civil rights activists; Paul La Prad, a white, Quaker from the north who attended Fisk; Marion Barry, who
later became mayor of Washington DC; and Diane Nash, a young black woman from Chicago who rapidly
emerged as a leader of the Nashville movement. Meanwhile, under the guidance of Lawson, the Nashville
Student Movement, which included LaPrad, Barry, Nash, LaFayette, Bevel, and Lewis, took shape.
☞
Read: p. 85 (start at “And now we were preparing …”) through end of chapter.
Pete Seeger is credited with combining two songs, “I’ll Overcome Someday” (a Baptist hymn) and “We will Overcome” (a song used by black
unions in the 1940s) into the now familiar anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, “We Shall Overcome.”
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