📚 Book🎭 Teens · Ages 14–17Graphic Novels / Comics

March (Trilogy) (2013)

About This Book

Congressman John Lewis tells the story of the civil rights movement from the inside, beginning with his childhood in rural Alabama and building through the Nashville sit ins, the Freedom Rides, and the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Co written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell, the trilogy renders moments of extraordinary courage and sickening violence with equal clarity. Reading it feels less like studying history and more like witnessing it.

Why It's a Classic

Lewis and Aydin structured the trilogy around the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, using Lewis's memories as a framework that gives the civil rights narrative both historical sweep and personal urgency. Nate Powell's artwork is extraordinary, using heavy blacks and dynamic panel layouts to convey both the claustrophobia of a jail cell and the grandeur of the March on Washington. The trilogy does not sanitize the violence of the movement; the Bloody Sunday pages, showing peaceful marchers beaten by state troopers, are among the most powerful images in graphic novel history. Lewis insisted on depicting his own fear and doubt alongside his courage, which makes the heroism feel earned rather than mythologized. The trilogy won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, making it the first graphic novel to win a National Book Award in any category.

Fun Fact

Lewis was inspired to enter the civil rights movement partly by a 1957 comic book called 'Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story,' which was distributed across the South to teach nonviolent protest techniques. The March trilogy was his way of paying that tradition forward through the same medium. Lewis and Aydin originally pitched the project as a single volume, but the scope of the history expanded it into three books covering fifteen years of activism.

Parent Note

The trilogy depicts racial violence, including beatings, bombings, police brutality, and the murder of civil rights workers, rendered in black and white illustrations that are powerful and sometimes difficult to view. The Bloody Sunday sequence and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing are particularly intense. Racial slurs appear in period accurate dialogue. There is no sexual content. The books are appropriate for ages 12 and up and serve as one of the most effective introductions to civil rights history available in any format.