Trish's Reviews > March: Book Three

So this is the book that won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2016. And it is a winner in every sense. The trilogy together gets under one’s skin. It has very little black/white discussion about it, which is exactly as it should be. The marches in Alabama and Mississippi were not so much about race as about human rights.

First off, kudos to John Lewis for lasting so long in the midst of such outrageous attacks on both his person and on his humanity. His personality must have just the right amount of tamped-down rage to light a spark but not start a fist-fight. How the authors (including the informative and evocative drawings by Nate Powell, and the dialog boxes by Andrew Aydin) decided what to focus on, what to emphasize, in this telling is what I admired so much.

There was division amongst the groups raising consciousness among black people in the south, and we see that. There were egos involved in who was leading by what method, e.g., Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokley Carmichael, Jim Forman, Fannie Lou Hammer, James Bevel. There was real ugliness in the behaviors of resistant white folks, even mothers with children, against peaceful black marchers demanding their lawful rights. There were murders and beatings and unlawful detentions by police and state law enforcement officials—the people we pay to protect us—with no state or federal oversight for years, despite direct pleas from demonstrators.

Lewis had a front-row seat to all that was going on in the south and in Washington. He was head of Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee and as the youngest of the “Big Six,” representatives of the most impactful civil rights organizations, he met with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Lewis has a story to tell, and in this collaboration with two younger men, shows us how momentous his contribution.

One thing that struck me is how much learning readers experience about how movements of resistance operate. Should we ever need to use nonviolent protest to preserve our rights as citizens (against a government or corporation acting unlawfully) there is much here to glean. How to prepare for pushback and what to expect, how to notify and organize the populace who may be supportive, and how to preserve unity among groups or ideas in the face of divisiveness. How to keep the economic, political, and social pressure on those we resist against, never giving them a peaceful nights' sleep.

Get this one if you have kids. This is worthy. Reviews of Books 1 & 2.