Congressman John Lewis, one of the last living icons of the civil rights movement, has teamed with co-writer Andrew Aydin and Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Nate Powell for March: Book One, the first installment in a three-part graphic novel series.
March begins with a pivotal moment in the movement--the Bloody Sunday march of 1965 in Alabama--before backtracking to document Lewis's life from his humble beginnings as a sharecropper's child to the struggle for racial equality as a nonviolent protestor during the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s. Education and a road trip north with an uncle open the young Lewis's eyes to a world where black and white can coexist on more equal footing, but the turning point in his transformation from dreamer to advocate occurs when he listens to a radio broadcast of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is then he realizes the possibility of change through peace, love and nonviolence and emerges as a champion of racial equality and social justice.
Through Powell's powerful graphical recreation of Lewis's life, we slip past the political struggles and into the soul of a man of courage and belief. Though much has been accomplished in diminishing the racial divide, much remains to be done to erase the economic divide; and in that, Lewis's story carries the same relevance today as it did for a generation nearly 50 years ago. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant