One Book, One Bedford – MARCH ~ Telling the Story

By Meredith McCulloch

“We have to tell the story,” Representative John Lewis says to Andrew Aydin on the last page of his memoir, March.  They are leaving the inauguration of Barack Obama, and Lewis is thinking back over the decades of the civil rights movement in which he played a major role – the protests, the marches, the threats and the beatings; the Birmingham bombing, the bridge at Selma, the March on Washington, and finally the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  “But you know I was thinking about that comic book idea. We have to tell the story.  We have to find a great artist who can make the words sing.”

“People are gonna laugh at us. They’re gonna say you’ve lost your mind,” warns Ayden.

“It won’t be the first time, sonny boy,” Lewis replied.

Thus began the birth of the graphic novel trilogy about Lewis’s life, the 2016 National Book Award winner MARCH.

MARCH has been selected for “One Book One Bedford,” a community-read program that focuses on Rep. John Lewis’s graphic-novel trilogy. The program is sponsored by The Bedford Citizen with support from the Friends of the Bedford Library and the Bedford Cultural Council, in partnership with the Bedford Public Schools. MARCH recounts Lewis’s years as an activist and organizer during the Civil Rights Movement.

Books are available for loan from the Bedford Free Public Library. There are three volumes.

MARCH, Book One: Book One spans John Lewis’s youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.

MARCH, Book Two: 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. 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. But their courage will attract the notice of powerful allies, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy . . . and once Lewis is elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 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.

MARCH, Book Three: By the fall of 1963, the Civil Rights Movement has penetrated deep into the American consciousness, and as chairman of SNCC, John Lewis is guiding the tip of the spear. SNCC continues to force the nation to confront its own blatant injustice, but for every step forward, the danger grows more intense. The only hope for lasting change is to give voice to the millions of Americans silenced by voter suppression. Lewis and an army of young activists launch a series of innovative campaigns, including the Freedom Vote, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and an all-out battle for the soul of the Democratic Party waged live on national television. With these new struggles come new allies, new opponents, and an unpredictable new president who might be both at once. But fractures within the movement are deepening . . . even as 25-year-old John Lewis prepares to risk everything in a historic showdown high above the Alabama River, in a town called Selma.

For more information and a full calendar of events, see
https://thebedfordcitizen.org/march/