John Lewis grew up on a farm in Pike County, Alabama, in the 1940s. He was responsible for the chickens. He named them. He preached to them. When his family ate one for dinner, he grieved. This is the opening of a graphic novel about the American civil rights movement, and it works because Lewis understood that the movement was built by specific people in specific places, not by abstractions.
March is a trilogy of graphic novels, written by Lewis with his congressional aide Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. Book One, the volume listed here, covers Lewis’s childhood, his discovery of Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio, his enrollment at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, and the sit-in campaign at Nashville lunch counters in 1960.
The framing device is Inauguration Day 2009. Lewis, now a congressman, is preparing to attend Barack Obama’s swearing-in. A mother brings her two young sons to meet him. As Lewis talks to them, the narrative flashes back to his own youth. The contrast between the present, a Black congressman attending a Black president’s inauguration, and the past, a teenager being beaten for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter, carries the emotional weight without Lewis having to state it.
Nate Powell’s black-and-white illustrations are spare and expressive. The violence of the sit-ins is drawn without sanitizing it. A panel showing Lewis being dragged off a lunch counter stool conveys physical pain in a way that text alone might not. The medium matters. Lewis and Aydin chose the graphic novel format deliberately, inspired by a 1957 comic book called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which had been used as an organizing tool during the civil rights movement. They wanted March to serve a similar purpose for a new generation.
Book One won the National Book Award in the Young People’s Literature category in 2016, the first graphic novel to win a National Book Award in any category. The trilogy has been adopted by hundreds of school districts and universities as assigned reading.
Lewis died in July 2020. He served in Congress for thirty-three years and was the last surviving speaker from the 1963 March on Washington. March is his most personal account of how the movement started, told at the level of individual choices: the decision to sit down at a counter, the decision not to fight back when hit, the decision to return the next day.
