March

Framed on the morning of Barack Obama's first inauguration, when Congressman John Lewis tells two young visitors his story, this first volume of an autobiographical graphic novel returns to Lewis's childhood on an Alabama sharecropper's farm, where he preached to the family chickens and felt called to preach in earnest. It follows his departure for Nashville, his life-changing encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. and the words of the social gospel, and his training in disciplined nonviolence under James Lawson. With other students he helps build the Nashville Student Movement, enduring abuse, arrest, and official resistance during the lunch-counter sit-ins that press the city toward desegregation, culminating in a confrontation on the steps of City Hall. Powell's black-and-white art intercuts the danger of the movement years with the later vantage point of Congress, presenting nonviolence not as passivity but as a practiced, collective strategy learned by very young people.

Author: John Lewis (with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell) · Original publisher: Top Shelf Productions (Marietta, GA), 2013