Website (for Congressman John Lewis)
Website (for Nate Powell)
It always amazes me that I can be so wrong about a subject where I like to think I know pretty much what happened. Before I get started I should point out that this is written by Congressman John Lewis, the last surviving speaker Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington. Which you should already know by his name, but if there’s one thing this country is good at it’s forgetting its history. Anyway, I had a number of assumptions about the upbringing of John Lewis, purely based on seeing him speak here and there. For example, I assumed that his parents had been the victims of some particularly awful racism, and this at least partly led John to take his life in the direction that he did. But that wasn’t the case. While I’m sure his parents were the victims of some awful racism (pretty much every black person was when John was a kid), they were very much the types of people who were happy to keep their heads down and try to lead normal, quiet lives. I also foolishly assumed that non-violent protestors just showed up to protests with the patience of saints, but in reality members of the groups would do training sessions where they taunted each other, spit on friends and generally tried everything they could think of to get the other person to lash out. Not everybody could do it, which makes sense, as I don’t know if I’d have that kind of tolerance in me either. Oh, and the law that desegregated the schools, the decision that is considered such a landmark today? It took a good decade before any kind of justice was able to come from that decision, and it wouldn’t have come at all without people like John Lewis. John grew up on a farm and was fascinated by chickens as a kid, getting a little too attached to them (he was on a farm, after all, and things rarely end well for chickens on a farm), but he generally had a good life. His life changed when his uncle took him on a trip to Buffalo, which let John see the reactions of his uncle as they drove through several states that were not safe for black people. And hey, there’s no reason to keep them a secret, if you don’t know them already: Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee. Gee, what do those states have in common? Anyway, he saw how his uncle visibly relaxed when they finally got to Ohio, and when John got to Buffalo he saw things that he had never seen before, like black people living next door to white people with no problems. This set John on his path, as he knew that he wanted something more for himself than a life on the farm, and the rest of the book tells the story of his sneaking off to school when his parents wanted him to stay home to work on the farm, starting to preach, getting noticed by King and participating in sit-ins at lunch counters at stores. There’s at least one more book in this series, and it was smart of them to release it in stages like this, as even this much racism is a lot to take in all at once. John and Andrew do a ridiculously thorough and engrossing job of telling John’s story, which is something I was a little worried about with two people so new to the comics field. Really, they make it look easy. As for Nate Powell, he outdoes himself again here, and I’m thrilled that he’s finally going to get some small amount of fame and recognition for his work. It’s a fascinating story, and if you don’t know it you owe it to yourself to learn all about it. $14.95
