When one of his chickens died, Lewis tenderly performed a funeral and challenged his family’s need to eat the animal. It was here Lewis first exhibited his need to care for others and to fight for love and justice. Lewis shares his story with the two small boys and offers them details from his childhood and his early memories of the civil rights movement.Īs a young boy, Lewis took care of the chickens on his sharecropper father’s farm in Alabama. As Lewis prepares to leave his office for the inauguration, he encounters a woman with two small sons.

The first chapter begins on the day of the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president. This opening serves as a testament for where the March trilogy is headed. The Prologue opens on Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Lewis and other protestors face terrible violence from local law enforcement. This graphic memoir tells the story of John Lewis from early childhood to his college years. This study guide obscures the author’s use of the n-word in its quotations. Kennedy…and once Lewis is elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this 23-year-old will be thrust into the national spotlight, becoming one of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement and a central figure in the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.Please note: This memoir contains racial slurs and epithets. Faced with beatings, police brutality, imprisonment, arson, and even murder, the movement’s young activists place their lives on the line while internal conflicts threaten to tear them apart.īut their courage will attract the notice of powerful allies, from Martin Luther King, Jr. After the success of the Nashville sit-in campaign, John Lewis is more committed than ever to changing the world through nonviolence - but as he and his fellow Freedom Riders board a bus into the vicious heart of the deep south, they will be tested like never before. Now, March brings the lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today’s world. Congressman John Lewis, an American icon and one of the key figures of the civil rights movement, continues his award-winning graphic novel trilogy with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, inspired by a 1950s comic book that helped prepare his own generation to join the struggle.

John lewis graphic novel