Photo courtesy of Spotlight Productions
Session II Fellows Josh Clauser & Jared Brewster are learning the advantages of collective leadership, lessons U.S. Congressman John Lewis learned as a child.

As Americans take time this month to acknowledge the many contributions of African Americans to our nation's rich history, the editors of the KLCC Bridge thought it timely to share an excerpt from Walking with the Wind, a civil rights memoir written by Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta.

Lewis's transition from boyhood to manhood coincided with the civil rights era of the 20th Century. He was a college student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville when he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped lead the vital youth contributions to the civil rights movement. Lewis remains committed to a life of public service and has been the representative of the 5th U.S. Congressional District of Georgia since 1987.

Walking with the Wind chronicles his experiences before and during the civil rights movement, but the prologue of the book recounts an earlier memory, dating back to when Lewis was four, the son of rural Alabama share-croppers. The brief tale, of a group of children, a tiny house and a storm, is a moving metaphor for the type of work KLCC fellows are pursuing in their communities around the country today. We are pleased to share it here and hope it will inspire our readers to continue their collective efforts to create healthier, stronger and more just communities.

Walking with the Wind by John Lewis
On this particular afternoon — it was a Saturday, I'm almost certain — about 15 of us children were outside my Aunt Seneva's house, playing in her dirt yard. The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn't thinking about playing anymore.

Photo credit: Bettman/CORBIS John Lewis (center, seated) participating in a temporary “sit down” protest during an attempted march in Jackson, Mississippi, June 15, 1965. Lewis was among an estimated 175 demonstrators arrested for protesting at the State Capitol.

Lightning terrified me, and so did thunder. My mother used to gather us around her whenever we heard thunder and she'd tell us to hush, be still now, because God was doing his work. That was what thunder was, my mother said. It was the sound of God doing his work.

But my mother wasn't with us on this particular afternoon. Aunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she herded us all inside. Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. Small and surprisingly quiet. All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier outside had stopped. The wind was howling now and the house was starting to shake. We were scared. Even Aunt Seneva was scared. And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up.

Photo Courtesy of the Academy of Achievement Congressman John Lewis addressing the Academy of Achievement in Chicago, June 2004.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it. That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift. And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.

More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart. It seemed that way in the 1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as it if might burst at the seams — so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together, and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest. And then another corner would lift, and we would go there. And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.

But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again. And we did. And we still do, all of us. You and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind.

This 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.

That is the story, in essence, of my life, of the path to which I've been committed since I turned from a boy to a man, and to which I remain committed today. It is a path that extends beyond the issue of race alone and beyond class as well. And gender. And age. And every other distinction that tends to separate us as human beings rather than bring us together.

That path involves nothing less than the pursuit of the most precious and pure concept I have ever known, an ideal I discovered as a young man and that has guided me like a beacon ever since, a concept called the Beloved Community.

— Walking With The Wind: A Memoir of The Movement, by John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, was originally published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster in 1998. The paperback edition, from which the preceding was taken, is a 1998 Harcourt Brace & Company publication.