March: Books 2 & 3

Books Two and Three of March by John Lewis continue and then conclude Lewis’s graphic memoir of his role in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. As a child, Lewis read Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book recounting the bus boycotts of 1955 and 1956 that helped kick off the civil rights movement. Some described the comic book as corrupting the minds of America’s youth, as it adopted a format usually reserved for superheroes and inspired many young people to join in King’s fight against injustice and question the conventional wisdom of their elders. The idea of publishing a comic book about Lewis’s life came from Andrew Aydin, a policy advisor on Lewis’s staff and avid comic book fan who believed Lewis could inspire young people the same way King inspired him. Lewis agreed on the condition that Aydin serve as his coauthor, along with highly esteemed illustrator Nate Powell.

This summary is based on the first editions by Top Shelf Publishing published in 2015 (March: Book Two) and 2016 (March: Book Three). For more discussion of the March trilogy, see the SuperSummary Study Guide March: Book One.