📚 Book🏛️ Adults · Ages 18+Graphic Novels / Comics

March (Trilogy) (2013)

About This Book

Congressman John Lewis tells the story of his involvement in the civil rights movement, from his childhood on an Alabama sharecropping farm through the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, drawing on his own experience as one of the Big Six leaders of the movement. Andrew Aydin co-wrote and Nate Powell illustrated a graphic memoir that makes history vivid and urgent.

Why It's a Classic

Lewis's decision to tell his story in graphic novel form was inspired by a 1957 comic book called 'Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story' that influenced his own decision to join the movement, and March continues that tradition of using sequential art to make political history accessible to young readers. Powell's art, rendered in dramatic black and white with expressionistic brushwork, captures both the quotidian details of organizing (the training sessions for nonviolent protest, the careful planning of sit-ins) and the explosive violence of the state's response (fire hoses, police dogs, beatings). Lewis's narration, framed by the morning of Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, gives the trilogy a narrative arc that connects the movement's sacrifices to their eventual political achievement. The trilogy won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the first graphic novel to win the prize, and its publication during the Black Lives Matter era gave it additional relevance as a document of an earlier generation's struggle for racial justice.

Fun Fact

Lewis was twenty-three years old when he spoke at the March on Washington, the youngest speaker on the program, and his original speech was even more radical than the version he delivered; movement leaders persuaded him to tone down language that called for a 'scorched earth' march across the South. The trilogy was directly inspired by a comic book: Lewis received a copy of 'Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story' at age eighteen, and it was one of the factors that drew him into the movement. Co-writer Andrew Aydin proposed the project while serving as Lewis's communications director and press secretary. The third volume of the trilogy won the National Book Award in 2016.

Parent Note

The trilogy depicts racial violence including beatings, bombings (the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four girls), police brutality (Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge), mob attacks on Freedom Riders, arrest and imprisonment, and the murder of civil rights workers. The violence is depicted in black and white art that is powerful without being gratuitous. The historical content is essential for understanding American history. No strong language or sexual content. Each volume is roughly 170 pages. Suitable for readers twelve and up. An essential graphic memoir and one of the most important works about the civil rights movement.