![]() ![]() Lewis decided his group had done enough testing. ![]() Four black students sat down at a Woolworth’s in North Carolina and refused to get up until they were served. In 1960, Lewis’s Nashville Student Movement was in the process of executing a series of “test sit-ins” - asking segregated lunch counters for service, then politely leaving once it was established that the lunch counter would not fulfill that request - when the famous Greensboro Woolworth’s sit-in took place. This summer’s gun control sit-in on the floor of the House recalls a much earlier part of Lewis’s career: the sit-ins in Nashville that form the climax of March’s first volume. ![]() Through it all, Lewis remained stoic and unresponsive, refusing to react to violence with violence. Over the course of his career, Lewis has been beaten bloody, hospitalized, and arrested multiple times, culminating in 1965’s infamous Bloody Sunday, when Lewis attempted to lead protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march from Selma to Montgomery, only to be viciously attacked by state troopers and police officers. It is unflinching in its depiction of the rage and brutality of the racist opposition Lewis encounters the second volume features a particularly memorable scene where a little blond boy grins and curls his fingers like claws while an adult voice booms from above, “That’s my boy. On every page of every volume, March insists on nonviolence in the face of violence and oppression. It was his experience with this comic, Lewis says, that led him to agree to write his own story as a graphic novel when Aydin approached him with the idea - and he hopes that March, like The Montgomery Story, will teach a new generation about the power of nonviolent protest. Participants studied a comic book called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which outlines King’s strategy of nonviolent action as a tool for desegregation. “We needed to see how each of us would react under stress.”īut the workshops also used gentler tactics. ![]() “We tried to dehumanize each other,” says the caption. In March, the workshops look harrowing: Participants alternate screaming racial slurs and threats at one another, their shadowy faces dominating the panels of each page as spittle flies from their mouths. Lewis went to college in Nashville, where he began to attend Jim Lawson’s workshops on nonviolent protest. In book one, set in the 1950s, we meet young Lewis, the son of share-croppers, dreaming of preaching the social gospel like Martin Luther King and practicing baptisms on his parents’ chickens. March chronicles Lewis’s long history in the civil rights movement, detailing how he became one of its so-called Big Six leaders. Books one and two were released in 20, and the third volume came out this August. March is a series of graphic memoirs written by Lewis and his staffer Andrew Aydin, illustrated by the award-winning graphic artist Nate Powell. To prove it, you don’t have to look any further than his books. “Sad!”īut Lewis achieved monumental results over his career, both in government and as a civil rights protester. “All talk, talk, talk - no action or results,” Trump wrote of Lewis, after Lewis said that he did not consider Trump to be a legitimate president. holiday weekend, President-elect Donald Trump started a Twitter war with civil rights hero and Congress member John Lewis. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |