Run: Book One

Run is an immediate sequel to the three-volume graphic memoir March, published between 2013 and 2016. March tells the story of Lewis’s most critical years as a civil rights activist, using his life story to shed light on the broader movement and its leading personalities, whom Lewis encountered regularly. The entire narrative is framed around Lewis attending the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president—a triumphant moment after a career dedicated to racial equality. March: Book One begins with Lewis’s childhood in rural Alabama, where he dreamed of becoming a preacher and practiced his sermons on the family chickens. At the age of 15, he learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott through a widely circulated comic book called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which strongly influenced Lewis’s decision to tell his own story in comic form. Lewis would later meet King when he was denied entry to Troy University based on race, despite the Supreme Court striking down school segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. While attending seminary school in Nashville, Lewis became associated with the student movement using nonviolent tactics to challenge segregation.