Politico.com

John Lewis, Superhero

2015-11-04

When the House in is session, Rep. John Lewis appears to be just like his other congressional colleagues. He casts votes, delivers floor speeches, shakes hands with constituents touring the Capitol. But on weekends and during congressional recesses, the gentleman from Georgia now adopts an unlikely guise: superhero at comic book conventions and on college campuses.The new role hasn’t always been easy. For days this fall, his staff tried to teach Lewis the Vulcan split-fingered salute—alas, to no avail—so that he could present an award to Nichelle Nichols, a.k.a. Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek, at the world’s largest sci-fi and fantasy convention. It was, of course, an unusual venue for the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee to find himself on a Saturday night, but Nichols and Lewis share more than might meet the eye.Nichols took on the groundbreaking role of African-American female starship officer on the sci-fi show in 1966, the year after Lewis was injured during the march on Selma that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In the 50 years since then, Lewis has moved on from firebrand activist (40-plus arrests) to elder statesmen (15 terms in Congress and counting). Now, sparked by the encouragement of a young staffer and a visit to Atlanta’s weirdly wonderful annual Dragon Con comics and sci-fi convention, Lewis embarked on a third act, becoming an improbable hero of the geek and nerd forces, and using his celebrity on the comic book circuit to reach a new generation.“My peers didn’t say much,” says Lewis, describing the 2013 launch of the first volume of MARCH, his planned graphic novel trilogy. “They thought it was kind of strange.” But now that it’s become an unexpected success—the second volume was named last week as one of best books of the years by Publisher’s Weekly—both sides of the aisle ask for signed copies for their children, grandchildren and constituents. Lewis has produced the first two volumes of MARCH, which recounts his life experiences and connects his history-making past with issues of today. Drawing inspiration from a 10-cent 1950s comic that chronicled MLK and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (a book Lewis himself read as a young man), the congressman, along with staffer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, envisioned MARCH as a tool to reach today's disengaged young people. MARCH is now integrated into college curricula, and Lewis and his co-authors draw crowds on campuses and conventions. It’s all part of what this year has turned into valedictory turn of sorts for John Lewis, as the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Selma bridge march where Lewis and other civil rights activists were badly beaten. At this summer's Comic-Con in San Diego, he “cosplayed” as himself, walking through crowds of costumed conventioneers wearing a trench coat and canvas knapsack, just as he did on the Edmund Pettus Bridge five decades ago—the outfit immortalized in iconic news footage and, more familiar to the youthful conventioneers, as part of the climatic scene of the movie Selma.This fall, during his address to Congress, Pope Francis singled out the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the anniversary of the Selma march as Lewis’s House colleagues reached out to pat his back in congratulations. The pontiff told Congress, “That dream continues to inspire us all. I am happy that America continues to be, for many, a land of ‘dreams.’ Dreams which lead to action, to participation, to commitment. Dreams which awaken what is deepest and truest in the life of a people.” Now in his 70s, Lewis has spent the better part of two decades as the last surviving member of the “Big 6” of the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young all died before the turn of the century—the last link to a generation that inspired millions. * * *In September, as his colleagues in Congress decamped for home and predictable photo-ops—parades, barbecues, Union Hall drop-bys and church picnic drop-ins—Lewis wended his way past Star Wars Stormtroopers and Chewbaccas, hobbits and Harry Potter wannabes and into the lower level of the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta to return to the scene of where his unlikely transformation began: Dragon Con, the world’s largest sci-fi and fantasy convention.A four-day festival that this year drew 70,000, Dragon Con features dozens of panels and appearances by actors on cult classics both current (The Flash) and long canceled (Buffy The Vampire Slayer). Having even the tiniest part in a Lord of the Rings movie means commanding long lines of fans at this convention, where you can take Tai Chi classes with Erin Gray (Buck Rogers, Star Trek Continues) or compete in costume contests or robot battles.Dragon Con transforms the bland concrete tunnels of Atlanta’s convention district into a colorful carnival—Halloween in still sweltering early fall. In the lobby of the Hyatt Regency—one of the first hotels in Atlanta to be integrated, ground zero for celebrities flocking to the city in the aftermath of the King assassination, and the celebratory venue of choice for Atlanta’s civil rights veterans—scantily clad Wonder Women and Game of Thrones dragon princesses pose for photos while homegrown Iron Men and Decepticons blink and clank through the atrium.“It’s amazing to me, the time and creativity that people put into their costumes,” Lewis says. “I was walking down Peachtree Street and saw a young man who had somehow put most of the parts of a fan—like a fan on your desk—on his head.” Lewis shook his own head in bemusement. “On his head,” he said again; in the drawl of his native Troy, Alabama, the word stretched out over three syllables—hay-uh-dud. For two hours, Lewis signed copy after copy of MARCH—taking each in turn and carefully signing with a Sharpie tucked between his middle and ring fingers, an awkward looking grip necessitated because of nerve damage sustained during the beatings at Selma. A line snaked from Artist Alley into the bowels of the Hyatt and back again. Thom Trainor, who has organized the comics track of Dragon Con for three decades, said that Lewis had drawn the biggest crowd at the convention, topping even comics writer <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/07/kelly-sue-deconnick-profile" target="_blank">Kelly Sue DeConnick</a> (Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy).Andrew Aydin, an aide in Lewis’ office and one of the co-authors of MARCH, grew up attending Dragon Con (this year marked his eighteenth visit) and said that the convention, in all its idealistic embrace of cultures and sub cultures represents an incarnation of the “Beloved Community” touted by folks like his boss and King. Asked if he agreed, Lewis drawls, “Well” (four syllables) and then says, “In its essence; yes. You see all these crowds moving around, there’s no conflict, no pushing or shoving.” He mentioned a shooting following an Atlanta high school football game the same weekend. “Here, there is no violence, people are respectful. That’s beautiful.” But is it anything like the Baptist church he grew up in?Lewis laughs. “No. It’s more amusing.”* * *“Most superheroes are fictional. The exception is with us today,” says Tom Heintjes, introducing Lewis and Aydin to a conference room packed with Dragon Con goers. They stand up in the back of the room, sit cross-legged on the floor, and lean against the walls. (“I got there late, and thought I had the wrong room,” Heintjes said later. “Standing room only and lines down the hall; I assumed it must be some Lord of the Rings panel.”) Connar Johnson first learned about John Lewis when the congressman was a guest on The Daily Show. “I hadn’t heard of him before,” Johnson says. “But now he is a huge hero of mine.” Johnson and his friends drove from Mt. Julia, Tennessee, to Atlanta to attend Dragon Con, and Lewis was one of their must-sees. Jennifer Ferrell, a high-school teacher from Columbus, Georgia, has been using the first volume of MARCH with her students. The school where she teaches has limited funds, so she has not ordered a full set of the books to assign to students, but uses her personal copy to supplement their reading. She took students to see Selma, and uses the graphic novel to teach about the civil rights movement. “It’s helped them understand that he’s a real life person,” she said. And it’s inspired them to research more about the civil rights movement.Lewis told the audience that when he came to Atlanta in 1963, at the age of 23, he went to services at Ebenezer Baptist Church where Daddy King would call out, as his son, Martin Luther King Jr., preached: “Make it plain, son! Make it plain.”There can be no form plainer than a comic book—drawings, simple dialog in word balloons—to convey a complex message. The impetus for Lewis’s journey into the arena of sci-fi gatherings comes from Aydin, who wrote his graduate thesis on <a href="http://www.crmvet.org/docs/ms_for_comic.pdf" target="_blank">Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story</a>—the dime comic book that Lewis read as a teenager.Slim (128 pages) and light in tone (a central plot point is the young Lewis practicing his preaching in the family henhouse), the <a href="http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog/march/760" target="_blank">first volume</a> of MARCH chronicles the future congressman’s rural Southern boyhood, teenaged encounters with MLK, and early days as a student activist. The new book is weighty both literally (it clocks in at 192 pages) and figuratively: it covers the brutal beatings and imprisonment of Lewis and his fellow Freedom Riders, Lewis’s leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and culminates with the Birmingham Church Bombing that fall. (In an appendix, Lewis includes the original text of his fiery 1963 speech, some of which had been cut at the urging of the other “Big 6” figures.)When Heintjes, who edits Hogan’s Alley, a serious journal about comic books, asked if the darker subject matter and feel of the second volume was intentional, Lewis simply replied, “It’s the story—it’s real.”Making it “plain,” the graphic novel spells out the risks undertaken by the Freedom Riders (to whom Lewis and his co-authors pay tribute with a portraits and biographical snapshots, more details than in many of the weighty tomes chronicling the movement). In one of the most poignant scenes, a young Lewis joins an interracial group at a Chinese restaurant in D.C. for dinner before the rides are to start. For the sharecropper’s son from the Deep South, this meal represents not only a first interracial dining experience, but also the first time in a restaurant, period. (“I don’t know what I’d do if they had served me,” he told the Dragon Con audience of his sit-in activism at Southern lunch counters. “I didn’t have a dollar to buy a sandwich.”) The real whammy comes with a matter-of-fact detail: after that dinner the Freedom Riders filled out and signed wills.When they see him today, Lewis said, people often come up to him and cry. “I’m not a doctor,” he tells them. “Don’t cry.”* * * Dragon Con attendees hoping for a Lewis cosplay repeat were disappointed. The “real-life superhero” appeared in the real-life outfit of a septuagenarian on the weekend—crisply pressed gingham shirt, acid-washed jeans, bright white sneakers.Lewis’s foray into the world of comics is undertaken with the same serious intent as his lunch-counter protests a half century ago. He wants to mobilize young people to take action, and to drum up support for efforts to preserve the Voting Rights Act, the legislation for which he almost died on that bridge in Alabama. MARCH is on the reading list of more than a dozen colleges, including Michigan State University, Marquette University, Georgia State University, the University of Utah and the University of Illinois at Springfield. The two volumes made their way from the New York Times graphic novel bestseller lists to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/race-and-civil-rights/list.html" target="_blank">Race and Civil Rights category</a>, below Ta-Nehisi Coates but above Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns. (The paperback of Lewis’s conventional memoir, Walking with the Wind, falls in the 45,000s in Amazon’s ranks of bestselling books, MARCH Vol. 1 is in the 1,800s).The graphic novel represents considerable research on the part of Lewis’ youthful co-author. “We knew that if anything was wrong, everyone—from the Koch brothers to Pulitzer Prize–winning historians—would jump on it,” said Aydin, who spent months combing over SNCC field diaries, arrest and bail records, and other primary documents. “We know about the people who died in the movement, but we forget so many people were a hair breadth away from death.”In the second volume of MARCH, Lewis describes the friction that developed between him and his parents as he gave up the hard-won status of a pastor and college-man for the life of an activist. He likes to talk about his mother’s admonition against getting into trouble and her later pride in his “getting into good trouble.” “What is the good trouble we should be getting into today?” asked one attendee at the panel. “Vote,” said Lewis. “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have and we need to use it.”As the line moved past his table, Lewis smiled, signed, and posed as fans snapped selfies. Noah Doherty, a 19-year-old college student wearing elf ears and green leotards, said, “I think it’s amazing, in a good way, that a Congressman would do this.” Sidney Bennett, a retired lawyer wearing a Victorian gown embellished with “Bernie” buttons, was overcome. She retreated to a chair at the side of the convention hall, wiping her eyes. “I am so happy to see him here,” she said. “He represents a part of our past that young people are not exposed to. I lived in that world, and I don’t want to live in that world again. I am terrified we’ll go back there.”Lewis, of course, has no intention of looking back. He’s already announced a bid for reelection in 2016 and his colleagues in Congress can expect a spirited battle to preserve the <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/congressional-democrats-introduce-ambitious-new-bill-to-restore-the-voting-rights-act/" target="_blank">Voting Rights Act</a> and freedoms that Lewis fought for a half-century ago. And MARCH Volume Three is in production right now.