March – Books One, Two and Three
John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell
 
Good Trouble – “The first step? Learn the history of racism in America.” That sound advice was offered by Dr. Iheoma Iruka to my early childhood colleagues and I in January 2020. Dr. Iruka is a Research Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Early Childhood Health and Racial Equity Program at the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina. “You can’t be an activist if you don’t know your history.” That was historian John D’Emilio, author of “Queer Legacies,” speaking with Owen Keehnen during an online interview hosted last fall by Unabridged Books and Gerber/Hart Library & Archives. I couldn’t help but recall both pieces of advice as I read all three volumes of “March.” With the death last July of U.S. Representative John Lewis, all of the main speakers at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King offered the world his visionary dream, have perished. This trilogy of graphic novels tells Rep. Lewis’ story, from his Alabama childhood during the 1940s through the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. His story of non-violent perseverance in the face of day-to-day, month-after-month, year-after year ferocious discrimination, police brutality, voter intimidation, assaults, arrests, bombings, assassinations, and other terrorism is eye-opening, heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. The authors and illustrators bookend Rep. Lewis’ story with the events of January 20, 2009: the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America. As the election of the subsequent President showed and as the events of 2020 and January 2021 have made all-too-clear, the story told here does not include a neat, happy ending. The old and even ancient resentments and hatreds are still very much alive throughout America today. The struggle to widen the circles of freedom and equality continue. What will happen next? I will refrain from making any predictions, but I know history can be a guide. And John Lewis’ story – with his calm-but-incandescent advice to “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America” – is more pertinent now than ever.