10 years ago this weekend, I had just finished drawing March: Book One and joined my collaborators John Lewis & Andrew Aydin on a pilgrimage to sites of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama.
It’s increasingly hard to wrap my head around that weekend’s sincerity and sense of reckoning, in the knowledge that the last decade’s rise of mainstreamed fascism and white supremacy— including concrete work to dismantle the entirety of our society’s gains from the civil rights movement onward, as well as consolidated efforts to suppress the history and context of the civil rights movement itself. That includes coordinated intimidation campaigns and legislative attempts to ban and suppress our own work on March, including schools in John Lewis’s own congressional district. (I’ve written about all of this additionally at CNN, the Washington Post, and the Nib.)
Other specific moments, like then-Montgomery chief of police symbolically removing & giving his badge to John Lewis (specifically identifying the white supremacist police forces preceding him as “doing the work of evil”), and then being fired for it shortly afterward— a decade later, this kind of gesture is unthinkable as police have far beyond passed a point of no return.
I’m remembering that powerful weekend through the lens of still being fairly early in our work on the March trilogy, but I’m mostly struck with sadness and anger at a majority of white American adults’ refusal to question, learn, grow, and fight back against the rapidly-consolidating monster of fascism today. Fascism will come for them, too, and you, too— unless we stop it.
Our institutions absolutely will not save us. Only we will save us, strangers as neighbors. All power to the people— and especially all power to the young people.
