John Lewis & Andrew Aydin
John Lewis was one of the most consequential figures in American political and moral life of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a civil rights leader and United States Congressman from Georgia whose life embodied the principle of what he called “good trouble” — the courageous disruption of unjust order in service of human dignity and democratic equality. Born in 1940 in Pike County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, he grew up under the full weight of Jim Crow segregation and determined, as a young man inspired by the preaching of Martin Luther King Jr., to dedicate his life to its defeat. He was a founding member and later chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the architects of the sit-in campaigns and Freedom Rides, and one of the youngest speakers at the 1963 March on Washington. His near-fatal beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965 remains one of the defining images of the civil rights movement.
Lewis served in the United States Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020, representing Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District and serving as the conscience of the House Democratic caucus on matters of civil rights, voting rights, and human dignity. But it was his collaboration with comic book writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell on the March trilogy — a three-volume graphic memoir of the civil rights movement — that introduced his story and his moral vision to a new generation of readers. March won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (Book Three, 2016), the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the Coretta Scott King Award, among many others. The trilogy, reviewed on WritersReview, is considered one of the finest works of graphic nonfiction ever published.
Andrew Aydin, who co-wrote the March trilogy with Lewis, served as Lewis’s congressional aide and was inspired to suggest the project after learning that Lewis had been influenced by a 1950s civil rights comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. Aydin brought to the collaboration a deep knowledge of the comics medium and a journalist’s instinct for narrative, and his work in translating Lewis’s oral history into graphic memoir form was essential to the project’s success. The partnership between Lewis’s lived experience and Aydin’s narrative craft produced something that neither could have achieved alone.
John Lewis’s legacy extends far beyond any single book or political achievement. He was a man who, in the face of violence that would have broken most people, maintained a commitment to nonviolent resistance, to the belief that human beings are capable of being better than their worst impulses, and to the long arc of justice. His death in July 2020, during the summer of the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history, felt to many like the passing of a living link to the movement that had made contemporary America possible. The March trilogy is his gift to future generations: a testament, in words and pictures, to what young people can accomplish when they refuse to accept injustice as permanent.
