Hundreds of Miami-Dade County students had a chance to meet Georgia Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis at the New Birth Baptist Church in Opa Locka Saturday.
Lewis was there to talk about his trilogy graphic novel “March”—co-authored by his political aide Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell.
At the presentation, a choir sang the hymn of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”
People held hands as they swayed back and forth singing along passionately, much like the the Congressman’s message.
“I say to you as students, and young people: When you see something that is not right, not just, you have a moral obligation to stand up, say something and do something,” Lewis said.
The book gives readers a picture of the tension-filled, sometimes ugly, confrontations of the civil rights movement—through the eyes of Lewis.
The Congressman is one of the last people still alive who spoke on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., when Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous “I Have A Dream Speech” in 1963.
“Seeing Nate’s drawings, reading the words, I tell you, it was so powerful. On one hand, I felt like crying. On the other hand, I kissed a page,” said Lewis. Eighth-grader Ismael Perez from South Miami Middle School read the first volume of the series.
“Martin Luther King, Jr., all these people, fought so hard to get … to get the dream that they built for people like me. I am a man of color and I am Hispanic,” Perez said.
The Knight Foundation helped sponsor the event, and gave more than a thousand students from Miami-Dade County public schools a copy of the book trilogy.
Eighth-grader Amanda Manuel from Miami Springs Middle School was one of them. She says Lewis’s activism for black Americans inspired her.
“It is something that we need to continue on doing, but peacefully in a nonviolent way, because as we have proven before, it is the best way to get recognition and fix injustice," she said.
The third volume of the March series won last year’s National Book Award for young people’s literature.
Aydin said the book is a window to “the history of nonviolent protests, and how they progressed.”
“It seemed like a natural way to show others how to pursue those ends,” said Aydin.
Lewis added it is important to dig into the history of the civil rights movement and stretch beyond common core literature’s three main subjects: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the “I Have A Dream” speech.
“To go back to the sit-ins and see what happened, in a city like Nashville, you’re sitting at a lunch counter and someone comes up and spits on you or puts a lighted cigarette out in your hair, it’s sort of painful and it’s hard even for young people to believe that happened,” Lewis said.
