He is co-author of the first comics work to ever win the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel memoir trilogy MARCH, written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Awards-National Book Award ( more below)Ĭongressman John Lewis was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement.Education-American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville.Kennedy said of Lewis, 'John tells it like it was.… Lewis spent most of his life walking against the wind of the times, but he was surely walking with the wind of history.' ( From the publisher.) In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis’s vision and perseverance altered history. Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. 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’s adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement’s most charismatic and courageous leaders. 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. 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. John Lewis and Michael D'Orso, 2015 (reissue, 2020)Īn award-winning national bestseller, Walking with the Wind is one of our most important records of the American Civil Rights Movement. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

John lewis book walking with the wind