It seems fitting to tie in to my Monday blog about John Lewis with a review of his trilogy that recounts his participation in the civil rights movement. March, co-written by John Lewis with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell in a graphic format, is listed by School Library Journal as eighth grade and up. I would agree with that assessment with the understanding that there is no cap on the “up” part.
The frame for the trilogy is the inauguration of Barack Obama with John Lewis looking back over where his life has come. The three books take him from his birth on an Alabama farm through the Civil Rights Movement and up to the signing of the Voting Rights Act by Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965. I will give a timeline and a tidbit from each book.
March: Book One
This first book of the trilogy begins with a detailed version of the famous story of John Lewis preaching to the chickens as a child and ends with the non-violent sit-ins at lunch counters during his beginnings with the Civil Rights Movement. The tidbit that struck me in this volume was a line in his description of their nonviolent training, “But the hardest part to learn – to truly understand in your heart – was how to find LOVE for your attacker.”
March: Book Two
Book Two begins where the first book left off with the demonstrators moving from the lunch counters to fast food restaurants and cafeterias. They move on as Freedom Riders seeking to desegregate public facilities and transportation and end with the March on Washington in 1963. By this time the 23-year-old John Lewis is one of the “Big Six” leaders in the movement and chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A tidbit from this volume has John Lewis maintaining the nonviolent discipline and realizing that while others had the same cause, their methods were different.
March: Book Three
Book Three takes the movement through Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, the urgency to have the right to vote, and the battle for a place in the Democratic Party before ending with the signing by President Johnson of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. The tidbit that struck me in this book was one his giving credit to multi-racial help and strong different groups who are working on the same issues but with drastically different opinions about how to get things done along with his ability to value the person with a different view.
The trilogy does not sugar coat the rough parts nor tone down the arguments among the different groups who want justice about how to achieve it. The accurate history lesson will remind us of a quote I heard from John Lewis in recent days, “We’ve come a long ways, but we still have a long ways to go.”