Bookish Thoughts

The second volume of March  closed on John Lewis' speech at the March of Washington, and then included the original text of the speech, which was edited moments before he gave it. In that speech he points out that the Civil Rights Act, while a step forward, did not do enough. Specifically, it did not guarantee African-Americans the right to vote, thus allowing individual states to continue to deny them full citizenship. The third volume focuses on the fight to get the Voting Rights Act passed, ultimately ending back where the first book started, with the inauguration of President Obama. Once again, this book doesn't shy away from the hatred and violence that John Lewis and his cohorts faced in trying to secure their rights. The endless protests trying to get people registered, inevitably followed by beatings and arrests. And more than a few deaths. This book maybe be John Lewis' memoir, and it's certainly skewed towards his perspective, but it functions more as a hi...

The second volume of John Lewis' graphic memoir spends most of it's focus on the Freedom Riders. During this time, John Lewis rises through the ranks of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually becoming chairman. He also becomes a bigger presence in the Civil Rights movement in general, and the book ends with the March on Washington, with Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech and John Lewis' own speech at the same event. This book really drives home how much work and organization went into the Civil Rights movement. And how much hate and resistance they faced. Learning about these things in school or online, it's easy to distance yourself a bit and focus on the results rather than the process. We always hear about Rosa Parks and her famous refusal to give up her seat. We don't hear about everything else that went into to both creating that moment and leveraging it. By telling his story with pictures, Lewis a...

I finally got my hands on the second and third volumes in John Lewis' graphic memoir, March , so I had to go back and re-read the first one. The memoir as a whole is about Lewis' experiences in the Civil Rights movement, and the first volume is specifically about how he came to be involved with it and his participation in the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. It goes in depth with the training Lewis and his fellow students received before the sit-ins, which was quite extensive. And it also shows a lot of the hatred and violence they faced, including attempts on their lives. The story as a whole is told through flashbacks, both John Lewis' memory and the stories he tells a couple of young constituents who come by his office in the Capital. In the present, this is all happening on the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. The frame provides a nice counter-balance to the story, showing how far we've come and how ...

This is the first of a three-part memoir, written by Congressman John Lewis. It covers his early life, from his childhood raising chickens on a farm, through meeting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and his work helping to organize and participate in the Nashville sit-ins as a college student. Lewis is a major figure from the Civil Rights movement, and his choice to present his memoir in graphic novel form makes it much more accessible to a wider audience. The story is framed through the present - or the recent past anyway. On the morning of Obama's first inauguration, Lewis meets a pair of young boys in his office and tells them the story of his life. It's a neat way to position him as both hero and human, someone who can and should be emulated. And the framing (and what has happened since) helps drive in both how far the country has come and how far it still has to go. I was really moved by this story, frequently blinking back tears. It went really quick, as graphic memoirs te...