On the Coffee Table: March Book Three

Title: March: Book Three
Writers: John Lewis and Andrew Aydin
Artist: Nate Powell

via Goodreads

Book Three of John Lewis's March series opens in 1963 with the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a white supremacist terrorist attack that killed Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Carol Denise McNair (11).  The murders were a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, contributing to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The third book is the most intensely political of the three books, both inside and outside the movement.  (Please read my reflections on Book One and Book Two.)  While there had always been some tension between the major groups, Lewis even admits to the mistrust of him within his own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  After Kennedy's assassination, no one within the movement was quite sure what to expect from his Presidential successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson who had supported segregation in his time as a US Senator from Texas, a southern, Jim Crow state. 

Another thing I have learned more about from Congressman Lewis's books: the inspiration many American civil rights leaders took from similar, simultaneous efforts in Africa, most of that continent finally emerging from colonial rule.  Singer Harry Belafonte invited Lewis and other SNCC delegates along with him on a trip to Africa in, I believe, 1964.  It was the first visit for Lewis.  On that trip, Lewis ran into Malcolm X.  In fact, Lewis identifies it as the last time he saw Malcolm alive.  Malcolm X - just as polarizing a figure within the Civil Rights Movement as outside it - turns up a few times in the series but he definitely features most prominently in this last book. 

Included also, of course, is the march for which the series is named: not the March on Washington but the one from Selma to Washington in 1965, a story also told in the 2014 film Selma (read reflection here).

Overall, the series is outstanding, residing comfortably on the graphic novel Must Read shelf alongside Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (read here) and Art Spiegelman's Maus.  Forced to pick a favorite, I'd choose Book Two but truly, one should read all three.  The best books inspire me to read other books and I have already added several Movement histories to my wish list.  Lewis also has a sequel series in the works entitled Run.