55 pages • 1-hour read
March: Book Two
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Background
Series Context: March Book One
Content Warning: This section of the guide feature depictions of racism and graphic violence.
March: Book One is the first installment in John Lewis and Andrew Aydin’s graphic memoir trilogy, illustrated by Nate Powell. It takes place in two main timelines. Like in March: Book Two, the frame narrative in January 2009 takes place on the day of the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. As John Lewis, then a member of Congress, prepares for the inauguration in his office, a Black mother enters with her two children, wanting to show them Congressman Lewis’s office so they can learn about his role in Black history in the civil rights era. Lewis begins telling the boys and mother stories about his childhood as the son of a sharecropper in Alabama: These stories compose the memoir’s second main timeline.
Lewis begins his recollections by talking about the close, compassionate relationship he developed with his family’s chickens, whom he often preached to as his interest in preaching grew. A trip north with his uncle draws the young Lewis’s attention to the inequities Black people face in the South. This awareness is heightened by attending a segregated school. Despite their lack of resources, Lewis loves school. In 1954, he hears about the ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education but is frustrated by the hesitant response of his parents and the way local preachers are disengaged from issues of prejudice. He is inspired when he hears Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. preaching a “social gospel” that interweaves faith with civil rights. He recounts hearing about other important civil rights moments, like the lynching and murder of Emmett Till and Rosa Parks’s arrest, which led to the bus boycotts in nearby Montgomery.
Though Lewis has signed up to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, he feels moved to apply to Troy State University near his home, which has no Black students. He is ignored by their admissions, so he writes to Dr. King and makes his acquaintance, as well as King’s lawyer, Fred Grey, and Reverend Ralph Abernathy. They prepare Lewis for what he will face if he wants to sue to attend Troy and offer to back him, but Lewis’s parents don’t grant their permission.
In the frame narrative, Lewis says goodbye to the mother and sons to go to the inauguration. He continues to reflect on his experiences in Nashville. While at seminary, he meets Jim Lawson and attends a workshop on nonviolent protest. He is so moved by what he learns there that he encourages everyone he knows, both Black and white, to attend. They practice trying to rile each other up and staying calm and nonviolent in the face of aggression, insults, and humiliation. Though this is difficult, it strengthens their resolve. The group they form, the Nashville Student Movement, use these techniques to stage sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Lewis and dozens of allies are arrested, but they are elated and joyful about their action. They refuse to pay bail or plead guilty and are eventually released.
They continue to stage sit-ins and the movement grows. Lewis takes the lead in creating educational materials on nonviolent protest for new members. Black customers also begin to boycott downtown businesses. The white government tries to give them meager concessions, but they continue to pursue complete integration. Lewis, Lawson, and the younger generation of activists for Black rights begin to notice generational rifts between themselves and older generations of Black activists, like Thurgood Marshall, who urge them to accept these concessions.
In 1960, the home of Black lawyer Alexander Looby is bombed. Lewis and his compatriots rally a large crowd to march on City Hall, demanding that Nashville’s Mayor West order lunch counters to be officially desegregated. He agrees. Dr. King gives a speech in Nashville that evening, and stores begin to serve Black customers at the counter.
Historical Context: Segregation, the Jim Crow South, and the Civil Rights Movement
John Lewis’s work as an activist began when he joined the Nashville Students Movement to fight segregation at lunch counters. Segregation was the legal practice of requiring separate facilities—housing, dining, transportation, education, and more—for different groups of people, usually people of different races. In the post-enslavement United States, they were known as Jim Crow laws. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson upheld segregation as legal, while later rulings such as 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and 1960’s Boynton v. Virginia outlawed segregation in schools, dining facilities, transport, and other public locations.
These rulings were only sparsely enforced. In particular, “both rulings were largely ignored in the Deep South” (“Freedom to Travel.“ PBS). In the graphic memoir, organizations like SNCC and CORE have difficulties with the Freedom Rides in places like Birmingham, where they face resistance by the government, loyal transportation officials, and the commissioner of the police department, Bull Connor. The Riders find that the type of racist backlash they receive in the Deep South is different than that which they received in Nashville. When Lewis and a friend watch news coverage of James Meredith, the first student to integrate the University of Mississippi, his friend says, “Those mobs down in Mississippi make your protests here look like small potatoes, John” (122).
While part of this vitriol is due to the legacy of enslavement in the South, another reason for this disparity was that the local and state governments could make a vast difference in what civil rights legislation was upheld. For instance, in states like Alabama, the power of men like Bull Connor meant that Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s appeals were not cooperated with, while in Mississippi over 300 US Marshals sent in to enforce integration were injured in white supremacist riots. While Jim Crow, the de jure and de facto laws and regulations that enforced segregation, were nationwide through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they particularly endured in the South.
All the books in the March trilogy use the graphic memoir style to report John Lewis’s experiences fighting segregation in the South in the key years of the civil rights era. One of the topics March: Book Two touches on is The Diversity of Tactics Within the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis was a staunch proponent of nonviolent tactics, and his memoir positions these tactics as the dominant, morally justified approach. When discussing Malcolm X, who had a different approach, Lewis states, “violence, no matter how justified, was not something I could accept” (149). Malcolm X “rejected integration with white America as a worthwhile aim” and believed “the African American could never surrender his right of self-defense against white violence” (“Malcolm and the Civil Rights Movement.” PBS). While Lewis has respect for Malcolm X, he condemns his tactics and says he was “never […] part of the movement” (149).
The rhetorical positioning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as opposites is societally pervasive and is echoed to a degree in Lewis’s memoir, but it also creates a manufactured binary. In reality, “[i]In the last years of their lives, they were starting to move toward one another” (Blake, John. “Malcolm and Martin, closer than we ever thought.” CNN, 19 May 2010). The past timeline in March: Book Two ends in September 1963, with much still ahead for Lewis, King, and Malcolm X alike.
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