March: Book Three

March: Book Three is the closing volume of the graphic memoir trilogy by Congressman John Lewis, written with Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell. It opens in the fall of 1963, as Lewis, then the young chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, faces the aftermath of the bombing of a Birmingham church. The book follows the organizing of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the fight to seat a new delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention, and the long campaign for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, leading up to the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Powell's black-and-white artwork conveys both the danger the activists faced and the discipline of nonviolent protest. Suited to teens and adults, it works as both personal history and a close look at how a movement was built.