Lesa Cline-Ransome honors the remarkable legacy of civil rights leader and politician John Lewis by telling his story from boyhood to the first steps of his march on Bloody Sunday in Fighting with Love, illustrated by James E. Ransome. With detail and a deeply felt reverence, CSK Author Award Honoree Cline-Ransome (Being Clem; Finding Langston) captures Lewis's childhood in Troy, Ala., the discrimination he and his family faced, and how the words of Martin Luther King Jr. inspired him to fight for racial justice.
The opening spread depicts Lewis as a boy, feeding chickens. His nine siblings and parents stand nearby. Lewis could feel love "all around him," despite the "hunchbacked farming" of his family, the "Whites Only" lunch counter in town, and the laws that kept Black people from voting. Children's Literature Legacy Award winner James E. Ransome (The Bell Rang; Northbound) illustrates Lewis's growth on "found, painted, and purchased papers" onto which he overlays his pencil drawings. Ransome's art includes beguiling textures, evocative patterns, and vivid colors. He details the passionate and determined work of teenage Lewis and those who attended nonviolence workshops with him in Nashville: in one spread, Ransome depicts each person taking turns "playing the part of the angry whites they would face." Ransome captures Lewis's likeness particularly well, as in one moving spread that shows him praying before stepping foot onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where protestors would be attacked by police in what became known as Bloody Sunday. Abundant backmatter, including a timeline, notes Lewis's entire lifetime of achievements. --Julie Danielson, reviewer and copyeditor