The Birmingham News.
Iconic Civil Rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) isn’t your stereotypical superhero, but he is indeed a real life superhero and he wowed young comics fans at the San Diego Comic-Con in July.
Lewis visited Comic Con to promote March, a graphic novel trilogy that he co-wrote in the hopes of inspiring new generations to pursue activism and social justice.
About the novel:
March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.
Book One spans John Lewis’ youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.
Lewis was famously inspired to be a Civil Rights activist when he drew inspiration from a 1958 comic book called “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story.”
To get into role at Comic Con, Lewis actually did some “cosplay” and wore a backpack and trenchcoat just like he wore when he led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama 50 years ago.
Congressman John Lewis.
At Comic-Con.
In costume.
(Recreating his trench coat and backpack from Selma 50 years ago) pic.twitter.com/T4EHdbKZhs
— TopShelfProductions (@topshelfcomix) July 11, 2015
Rep. Lewis has great hope for future generations of activists. He told The Raw Story:
“It’s really good to see how people are responding. The great majority of the American people — especially young people — they’re doing what they can to get things right,” he told The Raw Story during a brief interview. “We will get it right because of the young. The young are leading the way. They are pushing those of us in American government at the national level, state and local level, to do more, to get on board. If not, we would all be left behind.”
The March books have been used as education resources in 40+ states. Books one and two are available on Amazon.
H/T Raw Story’s Arturo Garcia via Magnifico of Daily Kos
