Run: Book One

A fourth illustrated civil rights history/memoir by the late congressman John Lewis and the team behind “March,” his National Book Award–winning trilogy of graphic novels. The present volume (most pages were finished prior to Lewis’s death in 2020) picks up after March: Book Three, in the turbulent era directly following the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It finds a 25-year-old Lewis struggling to retain his chairmanship in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), rife with conflict. Members can’t agree on a response to the surge of white supremacist attacks nationwide, or the escalating death toll of the Vietnam War; some are questioning the effectiveness of nonviolence. Lewis’s plan to endorse Democratic Party candidates for public office creates further schisms within the SNCC; so does the Georgia state legislature’s refusal to seat an elected representative who had endorsed the SNCC’s position on Vietnam. When Lewis loses the SNCC chairmanship to Stokely Carmichael, he begins to despair at having worked so hard only to find himself washed-up at 26. He soon regains his determination to continue the civil rights struggle—this time from within the system, by running for office.