John Lewis’s graphic memoir trilogy, March, tells the story of a lifetime of outcomes and actions

In 2017, over the Martin Luther King Jr. vacation weekend, President-elect Donald Trump began a Twitter conflict with civil rights hero and Congress member John Lewis. “All discuss, discuss, discuss – no motion or outcomes,” Trump wrote of Lewis, after Lewis mentioned that he didn’t think about Trump to be a reliable president. “Unhappy!”

However Lewis achieved monumental outcomes over his profession, each in authorities and as a civil rights protester. To show it, you don’t must look any additional than his books.

March is a sequence of graphic memoirs written by Lewis and his staffer Andrew Aydin, illustrated by the award-winning graphic artist Nate Powell. Books one and two have been launched in 2013 and 2015, and the third quantity got here out this August.

March chronicles Lewis’s lengthy historical past within the civil rights motion, detailing how he turned certainly one of its so-called Massive Six leaders. Nevertheless it begins early. In e-book one, set within the 1950s, we meet younger Lewis, the son of share-croppers, dreaming of preaching the social gospel like Martin Luther King and training baptisms on his mother and father’ chickens.

Lewis went to school in Nashville, the place he started to attend Jim Lawson’s workshops on nonviolent protest. In March, the workshops look harrowing: Contributors 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 wanted to see how every of us would react beneath stress.”

However the workshops additionally used gentler ways. Contributors 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 device for desegregation. It was his expertise with this comedian, Lewis says, that led him to agree to put in writing his personal story as a graphic novel when Aydin approached him with the thought — and he hopes that March, like The Montgomery Story, will educate a brand new technology concerning the energy of nonviolent protest.

On each web page of each quantity, March insists on nonviolence within the face of violence and oppression. It’s unflinching in its depiction of the fashion and brutality of the racist opposition Lewis encounters; the second quantity includes a notably memorable scene the place a bit blond boy grins and curls his fingers like claws whereas an grownup voice booms from above, “That’s my boy. Git him! Them eyes — git them eyes!”

Over the course of his profession, Lewis has been overwhelmed bloody, hospitalized, and arrested a number of instances, culminating in 1965’s notorious Bloody Sunday, when Lewis tried to steer protesters throughout the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march from Selma to Montgomery, solely to be viciously attacked by state troopers and law enforcement officials. Via all of it, Lewis remained stoic and unresponsive, refusing to react to violence with violence.

This summer time’s gun management sit-in on the ground of the Home recollects a a lot earlier a part of Lewis’s profession: the sit-ins in Nashville that type the climax of March’s first quantity.

In 1960, Lewis’s Nashville Pupil Motion was within the strategy of executing a sequence of “take a look at sit-ins” — asking segregated lunch counters for service, then politely leaving as soon as it was established that the lunch counter wouldn’t fulfill that request — when the well-known Greensboro Woolworth’s sit-in befell. 4 black college students sat down at a Woolworth’s in North Carolina and refused to rise up till they have been served. The sit-in made nationwide headlines.

Lewis determined his group had finished sufficient testing. Every week after the Greensboro sit-ins started, the Nashville Pupil Motion began holding their very own.

High Shelf Productions

Nashville’s white neighborhood didn’t reply peacefully.

“Violence does beget violence,” declares certainly one of March’s captions, as a gaggle of younger white males try and bodily wrest Lewis and his fellow demonstrators off their stools, “however the reverse is simply as true. Fury spends itself fairly rapidly when there’s no fury dealing with it. The beating subsided.”

Over the course of the Nashville Pupil Motion’s sit-ins as portrayed in March, Lewis and his fellow protestors have been overwhelmed, drenched with condiments, sprayed with fireplace hoses, and even gassed with pesticides. They have been arrested a number of instances. The NAACP disavowed them as a gaggle of younger radicals.

However they persevered, and so they succeeded. Segregation turned unlawful. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was handed.

If Trump needs to see somebody with motion and outcomes, he doesn’t must look any nearer than John Lewis.

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