March: Book Two

In 1961, Lewis is an undergraduate upperclassman who has recently found his larger mission in life. The way that Lewis reconceptualizes the idea of “family” demonstrates the aspects of bildungsroman that animate his story. His birth family thinks of him as a “source of humiliation of gossip” (8), so Lewis creates a found family out of the Nashville Students Movement. On page 8, the page is filled with a black background. High up on the page, a small side-view image shows Lewis walking through the blackness alone. The bottom half of the page shows Lewis standing alongside his Nashville family. Lewis’s found family show his dedication to the cause and changing priorities, as well as the theme of The Power of Collective Action and Community Organizing.

Lewis’s hope and youth in these early pages, even in the face of extreme adversity and oppression, highlight Lewis’s older and more experienced character in the frame narrative. In the frame narrative, Lewis is a well-known, seasoned senator supporting a younger political figure, Barack Obama. The illustrations on page 27 foreshadow and parallel an event at the end of the graphic memoir, the March on Washington. In 2009, Lewis stands again at the United States Capitol, where he once stood giving speeches alongside Dr. King and other civil rights figureheads. Two-thirds of page 27 is filled with an illustration that depicts Lewis from behind, looking out at the crowd of 40,000 people gathered in attendance for Obama’s First Inauguration. 

In the bottom third, a panel floating in white space shows Lewis from a front-right angle. Unlike the large panel on the top of the page, which contains tens of thousands of figures in varying degrees of detail, this frame contains only Lewis, who has a small smile on his face. This conveys the individual importance of this event for Lewis: While racial tensions did not end in the United States with the election of Barack Obama, throughout the graphic memoir, scenes from Obama’s inauguration are used to parallel the 1960s storyline to highlight the type of future Lewis and others are fighting for.

The white space the panel of Lewis’s face is floating in on page 27 contrasts with how page 25 uses blacked-out space. On February 21st, 1961, Lewis and his allies are imprisoned for protesting at a movie theater. The bottom half of page 25 is almost entirely blacked out, except two small, crisscrossed windows of the prison van. This blacked-out panel conveys the closed-in feeling of imprisonment. Lewis reports that he spent his “twenty-first birthday—in jail” (25). In the United States, many people consider the age of 21 to be the entry into full adulthood, as it is the age when people can legally purchase alcohol and many young people are graduating college and entering the workforce at this time. 

Entering complete adulthood usually leaves youths feeling free and independent, but the structures of systemic racism in the United States do not allow for this sense of freedom equitably. It is significant that Lewis highlights spending this birthday in jail, with the half-blacked-out page relating the feeling of being trapped rather than freed. The blacked-out page on 25 and the white space on page 27 contrast in a way that highlights the liberties and freedoms gained between the two time periods, despite the fact that systemic racism continues to persist.

The illustrations across these two timelines contain other visual motifs that highlight how different John Lewis’s life is in 2009. On page 26, a series of panels show Lewis walking to the inaugural stage in a straight line with other governmental attendees. Arranged on either side of this single-file line are rows of policemen, facing inward to the line. In one panel Lewis cuts his gaze sideways at the policemen, while in another, he stares straight ahead and clutches his coat around his chest, perhaps conveying a sense of tension. In the 1961 timeline a page previous, Lewis and his allies also march single-file down a line of policemen, though this time they are being corralled into the police van. A panel on each page contains a close-up that highlights these different circumstances: On page 26, a close-up panel shows Lewis’s shiny dress shoes and slacks as he walks through the Capitol, while a close-up on page 25 shows Lewis’s hands, clenched and handcuffed behind his back. 

On the one hand, these juxtaposing pages show how far civil rights have come in the years between the timelines. On the other hand, the repeating figures of Lewis and the close-ups in both pages highlights how these two timelines are not that distant from one another: While the police might seemingly be protecting Lewis now rather than attacking him, his body language highlights how he has not forgotten these past events.

The illustrations through this section highlight the extent of police brutality faced by civil rights protestors in the 1960s timeline, introducing The Diversity of Tactics Within the Civil Rights Movement as Lewis and his fellow activists seek to put their non-violent principles into action. On page 21, a young Black man politely asks a theater employee for a movie ticket and explains to a police officer that he has enough money to buy it. Three panels show the immediate violence the police visit upon the man. In the top right panel, he hits the man in the face with a baton. In two panels below this, another young Black man tries to intervene with his hands open and held up, and he too is violently beaten across the head. The two panels that depict the beatings contain the sound effects “KRAK” and “SPLATT” to lend an auditory dimension to this violence (21). In both panels, the police’s baton and the lines meant to convey its motion break out of the boundaries of the panel, conveying a sense of uncontained violence. 

The bottom half of page 21 is filled with one illustration, showing the aftermath of this police attack from a distance. The bodies of the two men lie prone and unmoving while the policeman stands over them. To the right is another sound effect “PFASH!”, which branches off from a photographer’s bulb. This image draws upon the theme of The Nature of Media and Public Perception: The media begin to take photographs of the brutality, which begins to garner more public support for the movement.