March: Book Two

Within these pages, The Diversity of Tactics Within the Civil Rights Movement—on both an individual and organizational level—is highlighted by Lewis’s depiction of figures like Stokley Carmichael, who is introduced as a foil to Lewis. Lewis positions Stokley Carmichael as an outsider to the movement. After he returns to Nashville upon being released from Parchman Farm, Lewis says they were “joined by a number of people from out of town, mostly northerners coming or going from the Freedom Rides” (111). Even though Carmichael was an SNCC member in 1961, Lewis calls him “one of the people passing through town” (112), positioning him as external to Lewis’s niche within SNCC and the Nashville Student Movement, even though Carmichael participated in the Rides and was interred in Parchman Farm alongside Lewis. 

Lewis’s depiction of Carmichael as an outsider reflects the tensions between the two men over their approach to protest methods. Lewis thinks Carmichael’s “behavior was threatening to derail [their] efforts” (112), so he calls together a central committee to expel him from Nashville. Lewis believes so strongly in nonviolence that it leads him to ostracize those with a different approach, like Carmichael. Eventually, Carmichael would be elected to replace Lewis as chairperson of SNCC, showing how the collective did not necessarily all agree with Lewis.

In addition to the divide between stances on nonviolence, there is another internal divide between organizations on how to spend their energies. SNCC and Lewis strongly feel that their time is best spent participating in direct action, like the sit-ins or Freedom Rides. Dr. King, along with his organization, the SCLC, and Bobby Kennedy, prefer to focus on “suffrage” and “the right to vote” (113). King believes this will pay off in the long term, as they can elect officials who have their interests at heart. The pushback the Freedom Riders experience from governmental officials in places like Alabama and Mississippi shows how vital it can be to have sympathetic government officials. However, this strategy does little to change the lives of Black Americans in the immediate future. Lewis and those who favor direct action see how months of an action like a sit-in can directly result in integration legislation being enforced, rather than indirectly result in it like suffrage and voting.

These pages use the graphic format to show what the American public is seeing on television and in the newspapers about the violent backlash civil rights protestors face, contributing to the theme of The Nature of Media and Public Perception. As violent pushback escalates, activists who follow Lewis’s nonviolent paradigm fight back indirectly against their oppressors by publicizing their actions and letting the brutality speak for itself. Since a graphic memoir is a visual storytelling form, the panels are used to simulate the type of violence that would have been captured by the news media and disseminated to citizens.

Lewis introduces a figure called Danny Lyon, who is “a staff photographer for SNCC” (120). By employing their own photographer, SNCC can ensure that there is coverage of their actions. The middle third of page 120 contains a large panel that represents Lyon’s most famous photograph. The photo, which is depicted as a realistic sketch, depicts Lewis and several other Black protestors kneeling and praying at a segregated pool in Cairo, Illinois. Lewis is flanked by a young girl, showing the intergenerational dimensions of their struggle. 

On the top third of page 122, the entire page is blacked-out, except for a glowing television screen depicting buildings encased in smoke and white men throwing bricks. This is meant to represent the view of “the nation” as they “watched as more than 300 US marshals were wounded trying to protect James Meredith as he became the first African-American to enroll at the University of Mississippi” (122). For Americans who have not seen firsthand the type of violence that activists face, these scenes help drive home the severity of their struggle. Lewis understands this phenomenon and purposefully spreads footage of the police dog and firehose attacks by police against children during the Children’s March. The graphic memoir depicts those scenes the same way, as sketches inside a television screen.