March: Book One

This section first reveals a quiet street on January 20, 2009, in Washington, DC, John Lewis awakens in his home and turns on the TV as a news anchor emphasizes the importance of this day in the country’s history. Today is the day Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the first Black president of the United States. Lewis gets in the shower and sings, “Oh Freedom.”

The next section shows the Cannon House Office Building. Lewis enters his office and is greeted by his older sister Rosa. A woman enters with two little boys. She brought her sons from Atlanta for the inauguration, and she wanted them to see John Lewis’s office. He ushers them in and shows them around. One of the boys asks Lewis why he has so many chicken knick-knacks in the room.

The illustrations change and pull the reader away from the office in Washington, DC, revealing Lewis as a young boy on the farm. His family lived on 110 acres of farmland in Pike County, Alabama. Lewis’s father, a sharecropper, bought the farm in 1940 for $300. As a boy, Lewis talked to the chickens before he fed them. He could tell them apart and knew their personalities. He loved his chickens dearly and tried to defend them when his parents sold or ate them.

Back in his office, one of the boys interrupts Lewis and asks why he became a politician instead of a chicken farmer. Lewis explains he wanted to become a preacher. The illustrations return to Lewis’s childhood. By the time Lewis was five, he could read the Bible on his own and was struck by the verse “Behold the Lamb of God—which taketh away the sin of the world” (27). The illustration reveals the silhouette of Lewis with these words contained within the frame of his body. Lewis became involved in school and his studies, so his interest in the chickens lessened. He wanted to make a mark, but his parents knew how dangerous this could be and encouraged him to avoid getting into trouble.

In summer 1951, Lewis traveled north with his uncle Otis Carter, a teacher and principal. Carter and Lewis had to carefully plan their gas stops and restroom breaks because not every place would service Black citizens or offered “colored” bathrooms. One illustration shows Otis sweating and scowling as he drives, which reveals his tension as they drove through the South. Buffalo, New York, was a new world to the young Lewis. He was filled with excitement. When they reached his uncle’s house, he was surprised to find his uncle had white neighbors. The trip opened his eyes to a different type of existence for Black people in America. Although he missed his family and was ready to return home, Lewis felt forever changed by that trip.