March: Book One

Description: This graphic novel is Congressman John Lewis' first-hand account of his lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement. Book One spans Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a climax on the steps of City Hall. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington D.C., and from receiving beatings from state troopers, to receiving the Medal of Freedom awarded to him by Barack Obama, the first African-American president.

Review Quotes: "Brave acts of civil disobedience... [give] March its educational value even as Powell's drawings give Lewis's crisp narration an emotional power."-- The New York Times

"A riveting and beautiful civil-rights story... Lewis's gripping memoir should be stocked in every school and shelved at every library." -- The Washington Post

"Essential reading... March is a moving and important achievement... the story of a true American superhero." -- USA Today