Instead, he bolted for the junior high school bus when it came soĪs not to miss a day in the classroom.
The second episode featured Lewis's firm determination to get an education, causing him to hide from his parents when they wanted him to stay home from school to work in the fields. Their absolute innocence, he says, helped generate in him a sense of responsibility,Ĭaring and discipline - traits that would ''guide me into the heart of the civil rights movement.'' He preached funeral sermons when chickens died, and read them Scripture while distributing their food - hence his The first was when, as a child, he was placed in charge of caring for the family's chickens. Two episodes in particular stand out in Lewis's memories of these years. ''pure singing, the sound of voices fueled by the spirit.'' His recollection of the family's pride when his father purchased their own farm in 1944 and they no longer needed to be dependent on others the comfort of living in ''a small world, a safe world, filled with family andįriends'' - largely free of whites - compared with the humiliation of having to sit in ''Buzzard's Roost,'' the segregated balcony of the local movie house the importance of his local church with its Lewis's vignettes of growing up in the Jim Crow South in the 1940's brilliantly illustrate this virtue: One of the virtues of a memoir is that it can highlight through personal example themes that historians have articulated but not made vivid. Of ''Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood''), Lewis provides a compelling account of that topsy-turvy journey - an account rooted in his own history. In this powerful memoir (written with Michael D'Orso, the author Yetīy the end of the 60's, assassinations, disillusionment with the political system and a tragic war 9,000 miles away had eroded optimism and a sense of possibility. Of that decade, the civil rights movement toppled the legal structure of racial segregation, held forth the hope of building a society based on reconciliation and justice and helped create the foundation for other social movements.
N ''Walking With the Wind,'' John Lewis evokes, with simplicity and passion, how the 1960's transformed the United States. As a man, he helped shape the civil rights movement. As a boy, John Lewis preached to the family chickens.
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