"March" and Civil Rights Remembered

My first exposure to the Civil Rights efforts was not a book. I remember learning about the bus boycotts of the 1960s as a first-grader. After studying the "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I drew a poster of integrated schoolbuses as part of my homework. In all of the coverage of the March on Washington and Rosa Parks and the messages of the Civil Rights efforts, no one talked to me about the sit-ins.

Enter March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. It was not what I expected to find in the Boston Public Library's online collection next to Spider-Man and Star Wars: Vader Down. But I was drawn in by the cover with its marching feet and a row of customers seated behind a placard that read "Counter Closed."

Book One begins with a striking visual of marchers being threatened by police as they attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. After the protesters refuse to return to their church, tear gas is deployed. Night sticks come out. People are beaten to the ground. And then, after the title page, we see a man waking up on the Inauguration Day of Barack Husein Obama. He brushes his teeth while singing a song about freedom, ties his tie, and gets ready for the swearing-in of the first African-American President of the United States.

Before he can attend the Inauguration, he meets with a mother and her two boys who have traveled from Atlanta for the ceremony and wanted to see the office of their congressman. The man who has been with us since the beginning of the book shows memorabilia that shows how far the country has come, such as a photo of him with President John F. Kennedy and another of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

He is soon telling the story of his childhood in Pike County, Alabama and the story follows how the narrator was an ordinary boy who became an extraordinary preacher and the ways that he experienced discrimination and oppression in his youth. Young John was expected to use "colored" bathrooms and the broken-down school buses used for his transportation drove past prison work gangs populated by people who looked like him. The story follows him through the end of segregated education and his efforts to pursue higher education at a school that would not admit him.

The real centerpiece of this volume is the non-violent protest effort and it is eye-opening to read both about the philosophies espoused and the training the participants went through. Pages and pages in which they hurled racial slurs and attacked each other to practice their responses are compelling and it creates a real sense of tension during the depiction of the sit-ins. The book prints the instructions for people protesting by not leaving department store lunch counters, but there is concern that it will all culminate in violence against someone who breaks under the pressure.

As violence and humiliation escalate and arrests ensue, we also see the increasing solidarity among the community. peaceful protests increase and support on many levels accumulates. Thurgood Marshall encourages them, as does Dr. King. The volume concludes with the admonition to "Don't Get Weary."

Whether this is your first or fiftieth time studying the subject, March is a thought-provoking depiction of what was denied so many of our nation's citizens too recently. It should be part of any rich curriculum on the history of the United States of America.