Review: March Trilogy, by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell

I don’t feel kindly disposed towards Donald Trump for much, lately. He’s a plague on our country, an orange-faced, petulant authoritarian who seems to view disagreement and dissent as a personal insult. He’s an erratic narcissist who can’t seem to understand why every single man, woman, child, cat, dog, parrot, sparrow, rat, grasshopper, ant, mite, bacterium, virus, molecule, and atom in these United States doesn’t sing hosannas to his magnificence. And I remain convinced that his election was contrary to the will of the people.

But I would like to thank him for picking a fight with John Lewis on Twitter over Representative Lewis’s refusal to attend the inauguration, because that reminded me of the March trilogy, which I’d started reading a few years back, but never finished. Specifically, I read (and enjoyed) the first book, but I’d never gotten beyond that.

Well, I am nothing if not spiteful, so I bought those books in digital form on Amazon (I had previously bought Book One on Comixology before it was bought by Amazon), and fired up my iPhone, beginning with the first book. And now that I’ve powered through all three books, I am here to say that it was 100 percent worth it.

To summarize, briefly: John Lewis grew up on a small family farm in rural Alabama and became inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement as a young man. While attending college in Nashville, TN, he helped to organize a nonviolent protest movement against segregation at department store lunch counters. From that seed, and many others from around the nation, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee arose, becoming a leading organization in the struggle for civil rights. Lewis details his role as he became a prominent face in the movement: becoming a Freedom Rider, marching on Washington, organizing the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, nearly dying on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

Meanwhile, as he tells his story from back then, he also tells a more recent story: the story of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. The two stories are interwoven, with cues from the more recent past sparking recollection of the past. The third book ends with Lewis deciding to go through with creating this series.

The art works pretty damn well, though my personal taste (as I’ve discovered from my time on Marvel Unlimited) tends more towards the bright and cartoony. Obviously that wouldn’t work well here, and this is a very good style for the subject matter. I think the black-and-white coloring is very effective, though, for all I know, it may not have been entirely a creative choice. One of the tricks that I particularly liked was the way Nate Powell, the artist, worked in the ambient dialogue of the bystanders and (all too often) attackers, giving it a rather visceral feel, in my opinion. I guess I would say that it made me feel like I was there, in a way.

I finished this series feeling incredibly inspired. These next few years will probably be long ones, and I’ve been feeling a bit of despair over what will become of our country. But these books have inspired me to take action in order to preserve our country’s democracy and to extend justice — of all kinds — to all Americans. We’ve been in bad places before. But if we fight back, we might be able to get to a better place soon.

When you start to lose your temper, remember: There’s nothing manly about rage. It’s courtesy and kindness that define a human being — and a man. That’s who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

All three books of March are available on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.