Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.

By John Lewis with Michael D'Orso Simon & Schuster, $25

John Lewis still can't remember how he got back to the church. The march had begun at Brown's Chapel, in Selma, Ala., just before 4 p.m. on March 7, 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. had been held up in Atlanta. Lewis, the young chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was to lead the 600 well-dressed marchers who had gathered to protest Alabama's systemic refusal to allow blacks to register to vote. Though billed as a pilgrimage to Montgomery, the crowd didn't really expect to get to the state capital, which was 54 miles away down U.S. Highway 80; Lewis wore dress shoes and a light tan raincoat over a suit and tie. "Like everyone around me," Lewis writes in his moving new book, Walking with the Wind, "I was basically playing it by ear." Finally they set out down Water Street, then turned right and walked along the Alabama River to the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was steep, and Lewis noticed a light breeze as he and Hosea Williams reached the crest of the bridge. "There, facing us at the bottom of the other side, stood a sea of white-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen ...." As the marchers made their way down to the bottom of the bridge, toward the troopers, Lewis noticed several officers slipping on gas masks. Fifty feet from the line, he watched Major John Cloud put a bullhorn to his lips and bark, "This is an unlawful assembly. Your march is not conducive to the public safety. You are ordered to disperse ... . You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church." Lewis turned to Williams: "We should kneel and pray." But one minute after Cloud's warning -- not two, Lewis noted as he glanced at his watch -- the major lost patience and cried, "Troopers, advance." Lewis saw blue shirts, billy clubs, and bullwhips; he heard the hoofbeats of horses, the clunk of police-issue boots, the rebel yells. Then he felt the club come crashing down on the left side of his head and smelled the tear gas as he faded out.

Just after 9:30 that night, the nation tuned in. Lewis was in a Selma hospital, his skull fractured and raincoat soaked with blood, unable to recall the retreat from the bridge to safety at Browns Chapel. ABC interrupted its Sunday night movie to play the footage of the attack. Anchor Frank Reynolds let the film speak for itself: For 15 minutes, the country watched Cloud, Sheriff Jim Clark, and their deputies beat the marchers; at one point, Clark's voice could be heard shouting, "Get those goddamned niggers!" Within a week, President Lyndon Johnson had summoned George Wallace to the White House. When the meeting broke up, LBJ announced he was sending voting-rights legislation to Congress. The next day -- just 10 days after "Bloody Sunday" -- Johnson gave perhaps the most memorable speech of his career: "At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom," he told Congress and 70 million Americans watching on television. "So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma Alabama .... Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

The Road to Selma

It is a powerful tale. From Montgomery to Memphis, the touchstones of the sepia-toned saga of the civil rights movement are familiar. On December 5, 1955, on a bus in the Alabama capital, a tired seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person; a young minister in town, Martin Luther King Jr., took up her cause and laid siege to Jim Crow. The white South resisted with fire hoses and police dogs; brave blacks, many of them schoolchildren, many more barely in their twenties, courageously -- and nonviolently -- walked the line until, finally, Johnson signed the watershed civil and voting rights acts in 1964 and 1965. It was, it seems now, a clean kill in a Manichean struggle between light and dark, a warm civic fairy story.

But the truth, as always, is more complicated than legend. Two new books -- Lewis' excellent memoir and David Halberstam's sweeping The Children -- remind us that the movement's success was in fact far from inevitable and that the forces behind it were, in the beginning, quite ordinary people. They were caught up in extraordinary times, of course, but the men and women who made the movement were not born saints and martyrs: They were, at first, just like anybody else. Halberstam understands this: "We are a bunch of children," muses Diane Nash, then 21, the evening before the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins began in early 1960. "We're nice children, bright and idealistic, but we are children and we are weak. We have no police force, no judges, no cops, no money." Years later, Nash made an even larger point in a conversation with historian David J. Garrow: "If people think that it was Martin Luther King's movement, then today they -- young people -- are more likely to say, `Gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us.' ... If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, `What can I do?'"

Lewis' answer to that question is rooted in his childhood. One of the surprising virtues of his memoir is his portrait of growing up poor and black in the rural Alabama of the 1940s. Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, was born on a farm in Pike County: Until he was six years old, he had seen just two white people in his whole life -- the mailman and a traveling salesman. The son of sharecroppers (his parents lovingly called each other "Shorty" and "Sugarfoot" when nobody else was around), Lewis describes the backbreaking toll of farming in those days. "You had to bend down to pick cotton," he remembers. "Eight to ten hours of stooping like that and your back would be on fire. It would ache all night, and still be aching when You got up the next morning to go out and do it all over again." But Lewis was always a different kind of child -- and he did not come from a typical rural black family. His father struggled with debt, but worked hard enough farming and driving a school bus to buy his family a house. His uncle took Lewis oil a trip to Buffalo when the youngster was 11, giving him a glimpse of middle-class black life beyond the reach of Jim Crow. Then there were the chickens: Lewis was devoted to the farm's poultry population. He preached to them, performed chicken baptisms, and staged elaborate chicken funerals: "The kinship I felt with these other living creatures, the closeness, the compassion, is a feeling I carried with me out into the world from that point on."

Lewis dreamed of going to Morehouse like King, but there was not enough money. He ended up instead at American Baptist Seminary in Nashville, a tiny impoverished school where he first encountered Gandhian teachings about nonviolence. After a year there, he contacted King and Ralph Abernathy about his integrating Troy State, an Alabama school near grew up, but his parents -- worried about retribution in those early, violent days of the movement -- talked him out of it. Soon, however, Jim Lawson, a charismatic Gandhian in Nashville, fueled Lewis' fire, and the sit-ins to integrate the city's lunch counters were launched. Then came the Freedom Rides, the founding of SNCC, Birmingham, and Selma.

Behind the epic moments, though, there was deep uncertainty -- and always fear. One anecdote makes the point perfectly: One night in 1961 during the Freedom Rides -- the movement's attempt to integrate interstate bus travel -- Lewis and his colleagues were pulled from the Birmingham jail to take a surrealistic ride with Bull Connor. The segregationist Birmingham chief told them he was going to take them back to Nashville where, he said, "you belong." He chatted amiably enough with the seven Riders as they rolled up through northern Alabama; one, Katherine Burke, suggested Connor breakfast with them at the Fisk cafeteria when they got to Nashville. The chief said it would be his pleasure. Then, as they approached the Tennessee line, near a town called Ardmore, Connor's tone shifted: "This is where you'll be gettin' out," he said as his officers rousted the Riders out onto the highway. "You all can catch a train home from here," Connor said, gesturing toward a darkened depot. "Or maybe," he added with a chuckle, "a bus" Lewis wasn't laughing: "This was Klan territory," he writes. "We knew that." There was nothing but moonlight and terror. Lewis knew the rough outlines of the terrain. "There was not much chance that any of the homes we could see had black people living in them. Little towns like this were where the white people lived; you had to go out into the surrounding countryside to find the homes of the blacks." So they did, finding a weather-beaten shack. They knocked; an elderly black man -- looking "sad and scared," Lewis says -- refused to let them in. His wife came to the door and relented. In the morning the old man went into Ardmore and cannily bought eggs, bologna, bread, and cheese at several different stores; one large purchase at a single shop would have been suspicious.

And so a revolution was made -- not just in famous footage but in the piney woods of a long-forgotten world. Lewis' book is both a lesson in how the movement really worked and a clear-eyed explanation of why it fell apart, particularly after 1968. Lewis dates the beginning of the end from the Freedom Rides: The confrontation of those heady days attracted increasingly radical blacks like Stokely Carmichael who believed the future belonged to the violent. In 1965 the carnage at the Pettus Bridge moved a nation; yet within some black quarters, Lewis reports, he was dismissed as a "Christ-loving fool" and an "anachronism" Things only got worse: There was Memphis, then Los Angeles. Lewis was working for RFK, and was in the senator's room at the Ambassador waiting for him to return from his victory speech. As he watched televised images of Kennedy dying on the floor of the hotel kitchen, the Dream, it seemed, had turned dark.

Keeping the Faith

Charting the arc of the movement is the unexpected strength of Halberstam's vast history. As a young journalist in Nashville in the early 1960s, he was The Tennessean's principal reporter on the story of the sit-ins. Halberstam's portrait of Nashville in those years is masterful. He explains how Tennessee was essentially a border state -- the last out and first back in during the Civil War -- where race-baiting politicians (lid not fare well, even as neighbors like Faubus of Arkansas, Barnett of Mississippi, and Wallace of Alabama survived on segregationist bile. His recreations of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides are classic Halberstam: bold, opinionated, authoritative. (The narrative can be occasionally unwieldy, but then so was the movement) To his credit, he mines intriguing detail from episodes that seemed to have been exhausted long ago. One example: When John Seigenthaler, the Kennedys' personal emissary, confronted Alabama Gov. John Patterson about protecting the Freedom Riders, the segregationist pol refused and theatrically turned to his own public safety commissioner, an unassuming figure named Floyd Mann, to back him up. "Tell him, Floyd," Patterson said. "Governor," Mann replied, "If you tell me to protect these people, then I'll protect them." The room went quiet. Mann went on to out line his plan and, when riots later broke out in Montgomery, it was Mann who saved John Lewis' life.

Perhaps the most telling section of Halberstam's three-tiered work is neither "The Children" (about Nashville) nor "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" (about the Freedom Rides) but the final part -- "Coming Home." In it he traces the disparate paths of the children in the years since the movement, and in their successes and failures we see how the movement's triumphs created their own tensions. Lewis becomes a congressman, but has to run an ultimately divisive campaign against his old comrade in arms, Julian Bond. James Bevel divorces Diane Nash and drifts into the political netherworld, becoming both a LaRouchite and a counselor to Farrakhan. Marion Barry rises and falls and rises (sort of) again, his city sabotaged by his appetites and addictions. Others made millions and moved into the upper-middle class, or beyond; still others slipped out of sight. One thing was universal: The clarity of those days could never be recovered, and as terrible as they were, they were also, on some level, exhilarating. Once the enemy shifted from Jim Crow and Jim Clark to poverty, the fight became harder, the drama impossible to sustain. Halberstam skillfully explains why, and paints a panorama not just of a vast movement but of the quiet lives that drove it.

Lewis knows how far we've come -- and senses how far we have to go. "No one, but no one, who was born in America forty or fifty or sixty years ago and who grew up and came through what I came through, who witnessed the changes I witnessed, can possibly say that America is not a far better place than it was." In the House, he has basically stayed the liberal course, opposing the gulf war and supporting the Clintonian position of "mend it, don't end it" on affirmative action. But to his credit, Lewis has stayed the integrationist course as well, remaining faithful to the spirit of the March on Washington in a world more interested in Malcolm than in Martin. He understands, too, that the ground on which liberalism must fight now includes class as well as race: "There hasn't been a time in America -- certainly not since World War II -- that the classes have been pushed as far apart as they are today." He's right, and solutions will only result from the kind of interracial effort that characterized the movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, not the separatism that became so fashionable in the late '60s.

We may never recapture the drama of those days, but the wars ahead -- closing the class gap, fixing the nation's schools, rescuing the inner cities -- are not unwinnable. The movement's victories were not foreordained either, and much of the hard work unfolded far from the camera's eye, in places where Kennedys and Kings never visited. Lewis remembers this: "What tends to be forgotten among the dramatic photographs and news accounts of the moments of violence... were the days and days of uneventful protest that took place outside courtrooms and jails. People silently walked a picket line for hours on end, or sang freedom songs from dawn to dusk, or simply stood in line at a door they knew would not be opened, hour after hour, day after day." But the doors did ultimately open -- and may again.

JON MEACHAM, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is Newsweek's national affairs editor.