March: Books one, two, and three

March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, 121 pages

March: Book Two by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, 189 pages
March: Book Three by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, 246 pages

This award-winning three volume graphic lit series follows the Civil Rights Movement from the point of view of John Lewis, then a member and eventual chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As part of SNCC, Lewis led sit-ins at lunch counters and restaurants throughout the south attempting to end discrimination at these eateries SNCC participants strove to remain calm and nonviolent despite violence visited upon them by whites and the police . The group organized the Freedom rides, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer, both of which again exposed members to beatings from angry white southerners and to frequent arrests.
SNCC was one of the big-six participating groups in the March on Washington of 1963, and Lewis spoke at the event.
Lewis and the artists who created these books have done an excellent job in telling this fascinating story.

March: Books 1 and 2

March: Book 1, 128 pages, and March: Book 2, 189 pages, both by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and with art by Nate Powell

March recounts the life of Congressman John Lewis, one of the Big Six leaders of the civil rights movement and the only person still alive who spoke at the March on Washington. Using the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009 as a framing device, Lewis tells about his childhood as a sharecropper's son, his desire to be a preacher, and the experiences that led to his role in the lunch counter sit-ins and other civil disobedience movements in the 1960s. Book 1 primarily deals with those early demonstrations, while Book 2 sees him remembering the Freedom Rides into the deep south to challenge the non-enforcement of interstate bus desegregation and the events that led to the March on Washington in 1963.

You might think that a comic book would be ill-suited to tell a story like this. You would be wrong, of course, but there is also a historic precedent for this. In 1957, a comic about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott was published. John Lewis read this comic book as a young man and was inspired, and it was his hope that by publishing his story in comic format, he might do the same for others. Both volumes are fantastic, especially with Nate Powell's wonderful art. Rendered in black and white, he manages to capture what many of us have seen on TV (either live or in documentaries), and make it more than just a carbon copy of newsreel footage. For example, you can see and feel the dread of the Freedom Riders pulling into a town and being forced to wait on the bus while the mob grows outside, knowing they face violence as soon as they are allowed to get off. March is an incredibly important read, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I can't wait until book 3 comes out.