Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement [Paperback]

The award-winning national bestseller,Walking with the Wind, is one of our most important records of the American civil rights movement. Told by John Lewis, who Cornel West calls a “national treasure,” this is a gripping first-hand account of the fight for civil rights and the courage it takes to change a nation.

In 1957, a teenaged boy named John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama for Nashville, the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America. Lewis’s adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement’s most charismatic and courageous leaders. Lewis’s leadership in the Nashville Movement—a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville using sit-in techniques based on the teachings of Gandhi—set the tone for major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. Inspired by his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis’s vision and perseverance altered history. In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change.

The late Edward M. Kennedy said of Lewis, “John tells it like it was…Lewis spent most of his life walkingagainstthe wind of the times, but he was surely walkingwiththe wind of history.”John Lewis is the US Representative for Georgia’s fifth district, a position he has held since 1987.

Michael D’Orsois the author of sixteen books, which includeOceana,Plundering Paradise, andThe Cost of Courage. His work has been featured or reviewed inThe New Yorker,Time,Newsweek,Sports Illustrated, and other publications.