When the severely beaten body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was pulled from Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River in 1955, word didn’t have to travel far in order to reach John Lewis. The now Georgia congressman and longtime civil rights activist was a year older than Till when news of his murder made its way to nearby Troy, Alabama, where Lewis was born and raised. “I was fifteen, black, at the edge of my own manhood, just like him,” Lewis wrote about Till in his 1998 memoir Walking With the Wind. “He could have been me. That could have been me.”
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In the months following Till’s death, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat, Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Improvement Association in a boycott of the city’s transit service, and, by court order, the University of Alabama admitted the first black student in its 125-year history. “Right here in Montgomery,” King told a crowd of thousands in a Baptist church that December, “when the history books are written in the future somebody will have to say, ‘There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.’” It was the tumultuous onset of the civil rights movement, and it figures significantly into March: Book One, the powerful first part of a nonfiction graphic novel trilogy and biography of John Lewis.
Set within the artist’s jagged, lightning-rimmed line work, Dr. King’s “social gospel” rushes out into the parlor from the household radio, a vintage tube-driven tabletop number that’s clearly a product of Powell’s meticulous research. “I didn’t catch his name until the sermon was finished,” John Lewis wrote of hearing King back then. “But the voice held me right from the start.” As a young man Lewis would take King’s teachings to the pulpit of his own parish, and then later to Tennessee, where nonviolence workshops and meetings with ministers led him deeper into the civil rights movement—and eventually to its forefront.
Powell swaps perspectives frequently to communicate the unbridled frenzy of those afternoons, running Lewis’s narration across the center of the panels. Mass arrests of African-Americans for “disorderly conduct” in late February 1960 yield an engrossing two-page spread in March. Lewis is taken down to the Nashville jail, while verses from “We Shall Overcome” stream and swirl out of the cells. “We sang as we were led into cells much too small for our numbers, which would total eighty-two by the end of the day,” Lewis wrote in Walking With the Wind. It’s a deeply affecting sequence—a meld of strong narrative, Powell’s jittery white police officers on black pages, and an artful rendering of the movement’s most recognizable anthem underscoring the whole thing. For a 2011 New Yorker piece on his time spent reporting on the civil rights movement, Calvin Trillin wrote about the “freedom songs, echoing off the jailhouse walls” in an Atlanta holding facility. “It sounded like a full church choir,” he recalled. “I can still conjure up the scene in my mind; I can still hear the singing.”
By John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions)
Powell appears on the panel “Pitfalls of Writing” at Wizard World Chicago Comic Con Sat 8/10, noon, Donald E. Stevens Convention Center, 5555 N. River Rd. Rosemont
wizardworld.com $40-$60 per day, $90 four-day pass
