Dear John Lewis,

   MARCH was an insightful literary experience which catalogued your experience with an attack on a church during the civil rights movement. The story captured how at rest the churchgoers were just minutes before the explosion went off, and the immediate repercussions as well as those in the long term. It made an important point of showing that the boys participating in such a heinous act were Eagle Scouts who were very much unapologetic about taking the lives of 4 young people of color, showing the disregard for the value of black lives in that society by the racist whites, even at a young age.

     What intrigued me the most was the storytelling style being set in a graphic novel format, rather than just being words on a page. These made the visuals associated with the experience that much more vivid, and left a lot less to the imagination form a literary perspective. The fires on the page very much sold the idea of the chaos that was going on immediately after, as those in the church were scrambling to find their loved ones in the midst of the enormous fire that almost seemed to erupt across the panels, and colored the looks of shock and desperation onto the faces of the victims, details that could only could have been told from your first person perspective.

      While the events that unfolded were a tragedy, many could look to a solution to prevent an incident fueled by hate from happening again. The racism already deep rooted in the minds of the youth that bombed the church would have hard footing being nurtured in a society built on the principle of tolerance and non discrimination, and I think you could agree that these issues still being discussed in todays society would be pointless if not for the purpose of one day ending racism throughout the nation.

Best regards,

Oral Ferguson