March Book 1 is the first in a trilogy of graphic novels written by U.S. Representative and civil rights icon, John Lewis with his former press secretary, Andrew Aydin, and illustrated by Nate Powell.
March opens with the infamous 1965 civil rights march across Edmund Pettus Bridge en route to Montgomery, Alabama, where 600 peaceful protesters, including a young John Lewis, were gassed and beaten by State Troopers. Fast forward to Washington DC, 2009, where Representative Lewis awakes on the frigid morning of President Barack Obama’s inauguration. We watch a sleepy Lewis rise, bathe, dress, check his phone messages just like any other guy, and head to his office where he graciously engages two young boys in a conversation about his formative years.
His tale begins with chickens. Lewis, who grew up on his family’s 110-acre farm in Alabama, was responsible for the chickens and developed tender feelings for his charges. He saw each chicken as an individual. Lewis, who wanted to be a minister, preached sermons to his flock and performed funeral rites for those who died of natural causes. He could not eat the flesh of his birds that ended up on the dinner table.
Lewis loved school so much that he repeatedly disobeyed his father to continue his schooling instead of helping out on the farm during the crucial planting and harvest seasons.
A sequence of drawings and text that depict Lewis passing white children in new school buses, their state-of-the-art schools, black prisoners working on road gangs, and poor blacks toiling in the fields, during his ride to an inferior school succinctly tell the story of an unjust and unequal society. Young Lewis got his first glimpse of desegregated life when he spent the summer with relatives in Ohio.
Through Lewis’s early life, we sense of the character of the man who would embrace nonviolence and fight against injustice.
Meanwhile, a succession of events took shape, blazing a path that would fire up young people and ignite the civil rights movement – Brown v. Board of Education, the murder of Emmet Till, Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Boycott. Lewis, who listened to Martin Luther King on the radio, was aware of it all.
Lewis won a scholarship to the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville and soon joined the developing civil rights movement at Fisk University. He learned about Gandhi and nonviolence, trained in the tactics of civil disobedience, and participated in the sit-ins and boycotts that struck down segregation in Nashville. Lewis found his calling.
Book 1 ends with the Nashville victory – to be continued.
I’ve read books and watched films about the civil rights era, but there is something about the combination of words and art that make the graphic novel an excellent medium for conveying the emotion and intensity experienced by participants in the civil rights movement. Artist Nate Powell’s drawings nail the sights and scenes of the fifties and early sixties. The scrawled sound effects and ever-changing character of the hand written captions express the emotions of characters and add context to the scenes. Powell’s adept use of shifting black on white, and white on black tells Lewis’s story with imagery ranging from representational to the conceptual and abstract. March Book 1 is an inspiring read and I can’t wait for Book 2.
March Book 1 is published by Top Shelf Productions and is available in both digital and paperback. They have also published a companion teacher’s guide.