Walking with the Wind

Despite the trials and tribulations that Lewis experienced during the 1950s and 1960s, he never lost faith in a more just and healthier democratic society. For example, after the 1977 campaign, President Jimmy Carter appointed Lewis to serve as director of ACTION, a federal government agency in charge of volunteer service. Lewis’s “vision of poverty in this country was incredibly broadened and deepened by this job” (449). He had been aware of the conditions of Black and White men and women living in poverty in the South, but now saw for the first time the impoverished conditions that other minority groups around the country faced. Many of the people that Lewis encountered during his two years at ACTION felt ignored by the federal government. Frustrated with ACTION’s failure to serve the people, Lewis resigned. He did not give up on Washington, DC, though, and instead went back to Georgia to try to enter Congress so he could do something about the injustices he had seen. After battling his former friend Julian Bond for Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, Lewis held this seat until his death in 2020.

Unlike the dark tone of Part 6, in which Lewis describes the collapse of the CRM and the assassinations of two great American leaders, the tone of the final part of his memoir is more hopeful and optimistic. Lewis is proud that the CRM reshaped American society for the better: “no one could suggest that the situation today, especially in the Deep South, is anything like it was a generation ago” (490). Lewis does not believe that the battle for human rights is over, especially when some politicians now call for a return to the "better days" before Johnson’s presidency, seemingly forgetting what that time was like “for Blacks, for the underprivileged, for women, for the disabled. Ask these people if they want to back to that time. Ask them about the “values” they faced during that time. Ask them how ‘valued’ they felt. Do we really want to go back to that?” (491).

Lewis firmly states that going backward will not solve our problems. To create a better society, we, everyday people, must stand up. We are not powerless or voiceless—rather, we have the capacity to come together to form another movement that addresses the injustices that still plague American society. If we fail to come together though, Lewis worries that we will relive history: “I feel that I’m passing down a road I’ve walked before. The anger, the militancy, the separatism, the schism both between Whites and Blacks and within the Black community itself—it’s all so familiar. It is eerie” (492). He ends his memoir urging Americans to “move our feet, our hands, our hearts, our resources to build and not to tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to love and not to hate, to heal and not to kill” (503). We must accept that we are all living in one house, the American house.