Walking with the Wind

“Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me—not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole.” 

One of Lewis’s central beliefs about the role of citizens in society is that when the storm or struggle appears strongest, people must come together. For Lewis, the civil rights movement was not just a struggle for the rights of Black men and women, but for human rights. The struggle did not just include some of the most famous civil rights leaders, but hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom who remain unknown. All of these individuals sacrificed much in the fight for human decency. As Lewis notes at the end of the Prologue, this struggle is one that Americans continue to face today. To Lewis, the only way we will truly overcome this struggle is to stand together with perseverance and focus and “walk with the wind.”

“Nothing can break you when you have the spirit. We proved that in Nashville and Birmingham and Montgomery and Selma. But my mother and father and so many like them proved it long before my generation was born. To understand the spirit that brought thousands of people just like me to those spotlighted stages of protests and marches, I am convinced it is necessary to understand the spirit that carried people like my mother—simple people, everyday people, good, honest, hardworking people—through lives that never made headlines but were the wellspring for the lives that did.” 

Lewis strongly believes that the spirit of their ancestors brought the men and women to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Despite the incredibly hard lives that many of their Black ancestors led as enslaved people, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers, their tremendous helped them overcome daily struggles. In turn, this faith was instilled in their children.