"March" was inspired by "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story." I actually first heard about that comic from John Lewis, who told me that it played an important role in the movement. And so once he told me about that, it made me start thinking, "Well, why doesn't John Lewis write his own comic book?".
If voting wasn't important, why would they be spending so much time and so much energy trying to stop you from doing it?
Most students graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and "I Have a Dream." And that's it!
People forget that many of the aspects of the Selma campaign were laid out in response to the church bombing in Birmingham.
You cannot understand the politics of today without understanding the Civil Rights Movement and the role it played in our society.
One of the biggest challenges for us is that people have different accounts. People say different things happened at different times, and when you're trying to sort through all that, how do you decide what's right?
We were trying to show that you should be hopeful, you should be optimistic, but you have to be consistent and persistent, because it's not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It's the struggle of a lifetime. And so you're going to have to put in 40 or 50 years to reach that high-water mark.
Nothing surprised me more, and meant more to me, than seeing an entire class of ninth graders mob Congressman [John] Lewis at a book festival.
In so many ways, forces unleashed in response to the Movement have come to dominate our politics, and technology is allowing the same injustices to be seen anew.
I think people who agree with Donald Trump have repeatedly made the case that he should be able to say whatever he wants to say, it's time someone did that. But as we go and speak to the kids, the young people who are reading March, we see the fear, we hear them tell us how scared they are.
I spent 10 years in professional politics and eight writing comics, and so I look at it from both sides. I don't understand the logic in being frustrated with a system, so you choose to be a part of the reason why the system is so frustrating. If everybody voted, it wouldn't be this way.
We don't want to just tell [students] who the people are, we don't want to just tell them what happened - we want to show the process by which it formed itself.
You have such a sacred responsibility when you touch John Lewis's story, when you touch the story of the movement. You don't want to leave anything out, but you want to tell a good story so the people will read it and they're engaged and they don't fall apart with extraneous details.
I went on to write my graduate thesis on the ["Montgomery Story"] comic book itself. It was the first long-form history that was ever written about it. And it's how I found out Martin Luther King actually helped edit "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story."
