WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:06 — 81.2MB)
Civil-rights leader John Lewis died Friday, July 17th, at the age of 80.
Today we’ll pay tribute to the life-work of Lewis by revisiting our September 2015 program “ “Necessary Trouble: A Graphic Example from John Lewis.” This is an edited version.
Host and Producer Doug Storm interviews Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin about their work on the graphic novel trilogy of Lewis’s memories of his civil rights activism titled March.
John Lewis was one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington as the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966. Lewis also served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his recent death.
We’ll close the program with an audio selection from Lewis’s speech at the March on Washington. He was just 23 years old at the time. Medgar Evers had died in June of the same year at the age of 37; Malcolm X would die in February of 1965 at the age of 39. Martin Luther King, Jr. would die in 1968 at the age of 39.
Our opening song is “Black, Brown and White” written in 1945 and performed by Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy said that his protest song “is just about the way the working Negro is treated in this country on all jobs in the North, in the East and in the West, and you all know it’s true.”
We discuss the groundbreaking graphic novel series, March, an engaging and award-winning first-hand account of Congressman John Lewis’s lifelong struggle for civil and human rights. March: Book One spans Lewis’s youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nashville Student Movement’s battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins. The memoir trilogy continues in March: Book Two, including the 1961 Freedom Rides and the legendary 1963 March on Washington.
GUESTS
Andrew Aydin is the Digital Director & Policy Advisor to Congressman Lewis in Washington, D.C. and co-author of MARCH (a trilogy).
Nate Powell is a graphic novelist (and Bloomington resident) whose work includes March, the graphic novel autobiography of Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis; Rick Riordan’s The Lost Hero, You Don’t Say, Any Empire, Swallow Me Whole (which won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel), The Silence Of Our Friends, and The Year Of The Beasts. His most recent book is Come Again.
RELATED
Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve
Rep. John Lewis’ Speech at the 1963 March on Washington
Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story
MUSIC
“Black, Brown and White” by Big Bill Broonzy
“Mississippi Goddamn” by Nina Simone
“A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke
“Original Faubus Fables” by Charles Mingus
(“Backlash” by Nina Simone is used for program identification)
CREDITS
Producer: Doug Storm
Host: Bradi Heaberlin
Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson
Executive Producer: Kade Young
