Oral histories can feel more like chats between friends than textbooks. Oral histories preserve critical parts of the movement even “as the progress produced by protest is memorialized by three-day weekends and commemorative coins.” Oral history documents not just how people’s individual consciousness changed over time, but the kinds of social conditions that predicated those changes and the ways in which people tried, succeeded, and sometimes failed to make change within the movement itself. That’s particularly true for the Civil Rights Movement, which witnessed the mobilization and radicalization of thousands of African-Americans as they fought for fundamental rights. Often, the only remnants of their beginnings and evolution are preserved in oral form-a format that, though challenging to document and verify, is important for anyone who wants to understand social movements.

Since protest movements are disruptive in nature, explains Rogers, they can be hard to incorporate into historical narratives. The book has its origins in Lewis’ retellings of his time as a young man in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement-and as Kim Lacy Rogers explains, oral histories are critical for anyone trying to understand how the movement came to be. Lewis recently walked away from Comic-Con with the prestigious Eisner Award for March: Book Two, the second installment in his best-selling graphic autobiography.

Comic-Cons and civil rights rarely intersect, but if one person could make that happen it’s Congressman John Lewis.

March book 2 john lewis