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. Their small group builds a large following, eventually prompting Black residents to boycott the entire downtown. With the support of King, local businesses decide to serve Black customers, marking a decisive victory for the movement.

March: Book Two begins with Lewis broadening the campaign against Jim Crow, most notably in the “Freedom Rides,” in which pairs of white and Black passengers ride together to challenge segregation in bus stations. The campaign draws a brutal response from law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan. Still, the violence and resulting public attention forces the Kennedy administration to intervene and enforce desegregation in interstate public transit. Lewis then becomes chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which focuses on registering Black voters, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. This also met with a violent reaction, and Lewis and other leaders realize that the federal government would need to pass (and enforce) a new civil rights law to overcome the entrenched forces of white supremacy. Lewis is among the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, which culminated in King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. The joy of this extraordinary moment soon turned to horror, however, as the KKK bombs the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, murdering four young girls.

Such terrible actions lead many within the movement to question the wisdom of nonviolence, but Lewis’s commitment remain unwavering. President Lyndon Johnson signs a Civil Rights Act in 1964, ending segregation in public facilities. Lewis then returns to registering Black voters, particularly in the city of Selma, Alabama. Again needing federal attention to overcome local resistance, Lewis proposes a march from Selma to the state house in Montgomery. Leading that march on March 7, 1965, Lewis and his fellow protestors encountered police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they suffered brutal beatings, with Lewis suffering a fractured skull and permanent scarring. Two weeks later, the march resumes and is successful. Months later, Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, another decisive triumph in the fight against segregation. Run begins immediately after the signing of this act, detailing much of the work that still needed to be done.