John Lewis and his legacy, defined by popular culture

Former Rep. John Lewis, who died Friday on the age of 80, was one of many superheroes of the American social justice motion. And like all superheroes, John Lewis is the topic of a large number of popular culture tales on his origin, his work, and his legacy.

Lewis advised a few of these tales himself. Collectively together with his staffer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, he shared his life story within the type of the three-volume graphic memoir March.

However he has additionally been the topic of works interrogating his historical past and the injustices he fought towards that provide perception into Lewis’s accomplishments, and that may deepen our understanding of civil rights activism of right this moment. Lewis fought tirelessly towards segregation and voter suppression, and that work is chronicled in motion pictures like Ava DuVernay’s Selma and the latest documentary John Lewis: Good Bother.

Right here’s a popular culture primer to understanding John Lewis’s legacy, the work he constructed his life round, and the way that work continues right this moment.

Selma introduces us to a pivotal second in Lewis’s profession as an activist

Ava DuVernay’s 2014 movie Selma shouldn’t be centered on John Lewis. It’s about Martin Luther King, Jr., and it climaxes with the march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery. The march can be met with violent police resistance in a police riot often called Bloody Sunday, and it in the end led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

However any account of that march can be incomplete with out mentioning John Lewis, who was one of many youngest of the so-called “Large Six” civil rights leaders. It was Lewis who, together with Hosea Williams, led marchers throughout Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge solely to be met by armed state troopers. And it was Lewis whose cranium was cracked within the ensuing police riot. He would bear the scars of that assault for the remainder of his life.

Selma contains the march throughout the bridge. However it additionally delves into Lewis’s relationship with King, and the methods wherein that relationship makes each titanic figures appear extra human. In 2014, Vox critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff wrote of Selma:

The considered a film about Martin Luther King, Jr., instantly brings to thoughts sweeping vistas and sing-alongs of “We Shall Overcome.” However from every thing I’ve described thus far, it ought to be clear that DuVernay has much more curiosity in undercutting these preconceptions than anything.

She virtually needed to undercut them. At simply $20 million, Selma isn’t blessed with the form of funds that may enable for large scope, and it fills its forged not with recognizable names (save producer Oprah Winfrey in a small supporting position) however, as an alternative, with among the world’s greatest character actors.

Wilkinson’s Johnson is a person struggling to beat his personal prejudices and largely succeeding, whereas Tim Roth turns George Wallace right into a determine who would encourage comedian reduction if the issues he believed weren’t so loathsome. And as Hosea Williams and John Lewis, respectively, Wendell Pierce and Stephan James give King moments of pause and reflection he desperately wants.

John Lewis: Good Bother is an summary of a lifetime of working for justice and equality

“Get in hassle. Good hassle. Obligatory hassle,” is the mantra that John Lewis repeated time and again all through his profession, each to clarify his personal activism and to push others into theirs. And Good Bother, out this 12 months, is an summary of simply how precisely Lewis bought into that needed hassle. Vox movie critic Alissa Wilkinson reviewed the documentary earlier this month:

As documentaries of this type are likely to do, John Lewis: Good Bother glosses over the small print of among the extra fascinating and controversial components of Lewis’s profession, like his 1986 run for Congress towards Julian Bond, which reveals some necessary ideological and tactical disagreements amongst Black voters in Georgia and within the US at massive. Lewis is a vital sufficient determine to historical past to advantage a extra revealing portrait sooner or later. However John Lewis: Good Bother remains to be a precious and fascinating introduction to how and why folks fought within the civil rights motion and are nonetheless preventing right this moment, and a noble tribute to a person who’s been there for all of it.

With March, a superhero will get his origin story

Photograph by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Photographs

March is Lewis’s graphic memoir advised in three volumes. It covers every thing from his childhood baptizing the chickens his sharecropper dad and mom tended, to his work within the anti-segregation sit-ins and marches of the ’60s, to his newer profession in Congress. Once I coated the trilogy in 2016, I wrote:

Lewis went to varsity in Nashville, the place he started to attend Jim Lawson’s workshops on nonviolent protest. In March, the workshops look harrowing: Members alternate screaming racial slurs and threats at each other, their shadowy faces dominating the panels of every web page as spittle flies from their mouths. “We tried to dehumanize one another,” says the caption. “We would have liked to see how every of us would react underneath stress.”

However the workshops additionally used gentler techniques. Members studied a comic book e book referred to as Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which outlines King’s technique of nonviolent motion as a instrument for desegregation. It was his expertise with this comedian, Lewis says, that led him to agree to jot down his personal story as a graphic novel when Aydin approached him with the concept — and he hopes that March, like The Montgomery Story, will educate a brand new era in regards to the energy of nonviolent protest.

As a part of Lewis’s aspirations for March, he attended Comedian-Con in cosplay as his youthful self, together with the ditch coat and backpack he wore throughout Bloody Sunday. Then he led a gaggle of younger attendees in a march for justice up and down the conference ground.