Marching On

By Jack E. White

Of all the surviving saints of the civil rights movement, John Lewis, now a Democratic Congressman from Atlanta, remains most committed to its original creed. Unlike black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael, who ousted him from the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966, Lewis never abandoned his belief in a utopian "beloved community" in which all men and women are created equal regardless of their race. Unquestioning faith in that idea led Lewis from his family's sharecropper farm in Alabama to the front lines of the battle for racial justice during the 1960s; he never flinched as he suffered arrests and beatings during the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., the Freedom Rides and the brutal police assault on "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Ala., that paved the way to the movement's greatest triumph, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Because Lewis is much more a man of action than of reflection, his autobiography, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (Simon & Schuster; 496 pages; $26), co-authored with Michael D'Orso, at times degenerates into a travelogue of movement battlefields. But it also provides a stirring portrait of the power of moral consistency and courage. Lewis and SNCC colleagues like Diane Nash and Robert Moses were willing to put their lives and bodies on the line at a time when both white political leaders like John Kennedy and established civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. urged caution and so-called moderation. The young activists were simply unwilling to wait or compromise. Their impatient fearlessness shook America to its roots and changed the face of the nation.

--By Jack E. White