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Eric Arnesen, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. March., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1597–1599, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy346
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“But do you know, I was thinking,” Congressman John Lewis tells an aide on the concluding page of March: Book Three, the final volume of the trilogy, “I was thinking about that comic book idea.” “You’re serious?!” the aide replies. “Yeah, I’m serious. We have to tell the story.” To which the aide replies: “People are gonna laugh at us. They’re gonna say you’ve lost your mind.” “It won’t be the first time,” the congressman concludes (246).
John Lewis has told his story before. His Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement appeared two decades ago to critical acclaim. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, to name just some of its achievements. In just over five hundred pages, Lewis recounted his life from childhood through his election to Congress in 1986, musing in the final pages on the political events that unfolded in the following years. The heart of the memoir is a youth spent in the Jim Crow South and Lewis’s emergence as a leading activist in the civil rights movement. For students of civil rights history, the story Lewis tells is a familiar one—and the activist-turned-congressman has done much to make it familiar. As a participant in many of the pivotal struggles that exposed the inhumanity of the segregationist order and helped bring about its demise, Lewis was well positioned in his memoir—and in his countless speeches and interviews both before and since its publication—to help frame our memories and understandings of the modern civil rights era.
