Walking with the Wind

Nashville in 1996 looks drastically different from the one Lewis lived in as a student. Many of the stores that he helped integrate in downtown Nashville are no longer in business: “it was eerie to see [downtown Nashville] so empty and to see all those businesses—battlefields in a nonviolent campaign that was every bit as strategic as a war—gone” (58).

Lewis then flashes back to his first year at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville (ABT). Lewis desired to no longer be on the sidelines of history, so in 1957 he applied as a transfer student to Troy State University (now Troy University), which only accepted White students. After not getting a response from the university—a typical result when Black students applied to universities in the American South—Lewis sent a letter to Dr. King. Fred Gray, Dr. King’s lawyer, and Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, the minister of Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, responded with a round-trip bus ticket to Montgomery, Alabama. Lewis met with Dr. King, Gray, and Reverend Abernathy in 1958. The three leaders were willing to help Lewis if he truly wanted to desegregate Troy State, but Lewis decided not to force the issue with the university because his parents worried he would be killed.