Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > March: Book Three

March, Book Three, masterfully completes the trilogy, but perhaps because of its awards and popularity and its timeliness, maybe they will just go on with the project. And now that Senator Lewis has passed, maybe a companion volume at least can happen. These three volumes represent 7 years of work, well spent for historians and comics lovers and tose of us committed to racial justice. So put this series on your list.

March, designed maybe primarily for teens, for a new generation of activists, as background to the present, and Black Lives Matter, through yet another spate of white cops killing black kids, is a must read. To those, like me, who lived through the sixties, it is a chance to revisit the events of yesterday in the light of the events of today. The series is important, a comics trip back to (RIP, July 2020) Senator John Lewis’s personal experiences with the civil rights movement here in the U.S.. Is this just churning up old soil, digging at a scab that seemed to heal a long time ago? Do you think racism is dead, something we took care of back then? Well, look at the black kids being killed on the streets today and see if we don’t need to revisit the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century.

A couple weeks ago several students in my class chose to read the first volume of this series, after we had all read All American Boys, which is also a novel about police brutality, and they remarked to me that while they had known of some of the brutality that had taken place then, some of the specifics of this history was shocking to them. The first volume of March is kind of background, focusing on Lewis’s early life as it emerges into activism; the second is almost full blown, non-stop action, just horrifyingly engaging, but this third volume for me rises even further to greatness, extending the scope of the action and deepening the effect of the story with excerpts from various speeches and sermons and testimonies from the time.

Senator Lewis has written much of his experiences in other formats. It was his aide, Andrew Aydin, who adapted his story, working with amazing graphic novelist Nate Powell to create what has already become a staple in school curricula. It is--you may be surprised to hear--not a cleaned up, Golden Book version of the events for the kiddies. The language, the actual events, are not sugar-coated. Terrible things happened in this country, and they are shared here. The fact that some terrible things are happening to black people still in this country makes this book important.

Some important revelations that counter some of the reported history:

*A lot of people think of the Kennedys and LBJ as important white civil rights leaders, but as Lewis reminds us, they had to be educated and pushed to act, they were initially opposed to civil rights legislation.

*Sometimes you get the feeling from recent civil rights history that the Reverend Martin Luther King just sort of led a unified charge. Nope, he and Malcolm X battled on some issues, SNCC (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Lewis led) battled with King and people they viewed as more centrist, finally, like Lewis himself. Some people were sick of non-violence. They wanted a war.

*You might know Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls, a documentary about the 4 little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing, on Youth Day, when 21 other children were injured. What you may know is that that was one moment that shifted the tide in attitudes about racial relations and equity in those days. And there had been many people killed and many churches bombed before this one bombing. But white America began to hesitate in their opposition to racial equality when they saw children deliberately being killed. . . and in this historic black church. And why did the bombings take place? Among other things, to resist black people voting or even being registered to vote. 2% of African Americans eligible to vote were actually allowed to be registered to vote in Mississippi in 1963. And why do you guess that was? And does that resonate with anything you hear today about the suppression of voter registration among the poor and people of color? What you may not know is that after the deaths of those 4 little girls, Lewis reminds us, white teens roamed the streets beating up and shooting black folks in celebration of those deaths. And, in one anecdote I had forgotten, he relates the story of two KKK Eagle Scout teens who gunned down a black kid on the streets of Birmingham just because they had been riled up by the rally. Most of those crimes were never prosecuted; it took decades for even one of the murderers to come to trial.

If any of this interests you, it might be useful to order from your library Eyes on the Prize, the celebrated documentary series. Invaluable. Or view Lee’s 4 Little Girls. Or read some of Taylor Branch’s works on those days.

What many whites today know about civil rights history are white guy hero books like To Kill a Mockingbird, which I do think is great, but still, from a white perspective. We know MLK’s I have a Dream speech, which is great, too, yes. But we celebrate Rosa Parks as a little old lady who was too tired to sit in the back of the bus, rather than see her as the trained and passionate activist she was.

This book touched a nerve for me. I think there are more elaborate stories to read in Lewis’s own work and in other great civil rights histories. But this series, designed for young people and really all ages, finally, will work to help us/young people have discussions about Black Lives Matter and police brutality and racism and poverty. I had given 4 stars to the first two books in the series, but this one sparked something more in me. It suffers from having to tell too much history in too short a time; I am sure it proved a challenge to subtle Powell, too, who would not ordinarily use so many words in his own work, but you can see they just had to include excerpts from the great speeches of the time, all the rich and outraged and grieving language just has to be present, from Fannie Lou Hamer, from Dr. King, from Lewis himself. These speeches and sermons compose a very moving reflection on the past and present.

Today, as I write, there's another cop killing a kid in Tulsa, and in Charlotte. And Minneapolis. More than 120 this year already. It reminds me of Alan Moore’s American gothic horror tour of the U.S. in the sixties in Swamp Thing. Where’s the next stop, folks? Spin the dial . . . what fresh hell will we experience? And I live in Chicago, which is a different but related story. Read this series. It might be your way--or your kids's way--into the issues of today. Highly recommend.