Rep. John Lewis was so determined to finish his final memoir as the pandemic began that he devised a safety system. Andrew Aydin, his co-author and neighbor on Capitol Hill, would deliver their latest working pages to the civil rights icon’s home, hiding them behind planters on the front stoop. The Georgia congressman was 80 and receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer, so absolute social distancing was essential.
The hidden handoffs early last year brought Lewis joy in his final months. He died of cancer last summer, but not before telling his last impassioned story.
The creative result, “Run: Book One,” which will be released Tuesday, chronicles Lewis’s journey shortly after his pivotal “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Ala. — and immediately after the triumphant signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that concluded Lewis’s previous graphic-novel project: his best-selling “March” trilogy. The illustrated sequel spotlights how Black activists evolved into political leaders against the national backdrop of racist violence, voter suppression and the Vietnam War — dramatic scenes and themes that feel timelessly relevant.
“He was very hopeful that leaving his legacy in a graphic novel would give a road map not just to this generation, but to generations to come,” Aydin says by phone from North Carolina.
Lewis liked to recount how as a teenager, it was a comic book — 1957’s widely distributed “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” — that drew him into the movement of nonviolent protest: within six years, he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. The book’s brightly tinted comic panels, featuring such figures as King and Rosa Parks, had the power to “make it plain” and “make it real,” Lewis would say — especially appealing to a young person who couldn’t get a library card in his Alabama town because of the color of his skin.
Lewis and Aydin began publishing the graphic-novel epic “March” eight years ago, working with artist Nate Powell. The series received widespread critical acclaim, including the first National Book Award for a comic book, and became a must-have in schools. Lewis led a kids’ procession at Comic-Con International in San Diego in 2015, donning the same type of trench coat and backpack he had worn 50 years earlier while leading 600 protesters across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. “March” was eventually displayed at the same library where he’d been denied a card more than a half-century before.
Lewis knew how to dramatize conflicts vividly, whether on the page or the national stage.
Several weeks before his death in July last year, he walked across the large yellow “Black Lives Matter” lettering along the plaza in front of the White House. Widely shared photos of his visit evoked one of the most striking images from his graphic novels: On the cover of 2016′s “Book Three,” Lewis leads Selma protesters into the maw of state troopers primed for violence; large lettering spelling out “March” stretches across the concrete.
Powell, who rendered that cover, returned to draw the opening sequence of its new sequel: a protest scene that serves as a direct narrative bridge from “March.”
“Run” begins in Americus, Ga., in the summer of 1965, as Lewis is leading about a dozen local activists to try to desegregate a small church. Soon they are arrested and taken to jail, while outside the courthouse, the Ku Klux Klan is set to stage one of its largest hooded marches in years. “The ink was barely dry on the Voting Rights Act, but already forces were gathering to fight back using our own tactics, and America’s cities were ready to explode,” Lewis and Aydin write beneath images of far-right hate.
Speaking by phone from Indiana, Powell described the new book’s themes. “We’re not talking about victories,” he said. “We’re not talking about a war being won. We’re talking about the everyday anonymous work of protest.”
Because Powell was committed to other book projects when the work on “Run” began in 2016, the team turned to Texas-based illustrator L. Fury to create most of the art. It was her first graphic novel, as well as her first work of nonfiction. And to nail the audition, she needed to convince Lewis that she could draw him as a young man.
The congressman loved looking at art samples and was invested in how he was depicted, says Aydin, who also worked in Lewis’s office as digital director and policy adviser. The politician looked at Fury’s headshots of him. “He said, ‘Now that’s me!’ ” Aydin says. “He made up his mind, and that was it.”
Fury discovered that a crucial challenge at times was to draw people and settings despite limited visual references. “I’m used to inventing a character from my head — there’s no way to draw an imaginary character wrong,” she says, noting that it’s a hurdle “when you’re trying to re-create a face and you only have two angles, from the 1950s or ’60s — these people didn’t have Instagram.”
The book’s narrative is often propelled by Lewis’s perceptions of and reactions to interlocking events — including how his commitment to nonviolence and denunciation of the escalating Vietnam War put him at odds with other leaders of the movement.
Aydin likes to say that the new title reflects the idea that in a time of change, “First you march, then you run” — including for positions of power. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founding member Julian Bond runs for Georgia office, while Lewis loses his SNCC chairmanship to Stokely Carmichael — a difficult and emotional pivot point for the future congressman.
“Run” doesn’t shy from showing the brutality of white supremacy, such as when a wealthy Black businessman is murdered by the KKK in Mississippi. Elsewhere, Samuel Younge Jr. — a 21-year-old Black student activist and Navy veteran whom Lewis knew personally — is shot to death by a White gas-station attendant for trying to use a Whites-only restroom in Alabama; hundreds soon marched in Tuskegee to protest, and an all-White jury acquitted the attendant.
The artists say depicting such racist violence is emotional. “The level of rage and sadness was so tangible on the page — I hated drawing that [KKK march] sequence so much,” says Powell, but “it’s important to pay attention to those feelings and convey them to the reader.” Fury adds that as effective storytellers, they need to “sit in those feelings for hours a day.”
Many of the moments in “Run” speak to related struggles today. During Alabama’s primary elections in 1966, polling places are moved or removed to try to suppress the Black vote. A voting site that has a “Whites only” sign is captioned starkly: “Jim Crow was alive and well in Lowndes County.”
Lewis wanted the lessons of the movement to outlive him. A year after the congressman’s death, the rest of the “Run” team feels the honor and obligation of that narrative legacy.
“It’s hard to illustrate a person’s words and their life without feeling close to them,” Fury says. And Powell views “Run” as “very much a crystallized component of some of [Lewis’s] last great work: to carry the urgency of the anti-racist movement and the pro-democracy movement out into the world further.”
Aydin says that Lewis wanted “Run” to serve as a beacon not only of intellectual illumination, but also of political inspiration. “He looked around Congress and the country and saw we needed better,” he says.
And what makes better leaders?
“The congressman,” Aydin says, “wanted more people in office who had empathy.”
Aydin, Powell and Fury will participate in a virtual “Run: Book One” panel Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET, hosted by Politics & Prose bookstore. Details here.
Read more:
