Freedom Riders in March: Book 2

This section of The March Comic Book was pretty brutal. The beginning of the second book started off with John Lewis at The House of Representatives waiting to be seated for a ceremony in Washington D.C. On the next page, the reader learns that John Lewis rarely goes home due to his damaged relationship with his parents after getting arrested. However, John Lewis is a part of the group called The Freedom Riders in Nashville that feels more like home to him than his actual home. This part of the comic was a little hard to understand because I felt like it jumped around a lot. For example, it started in 2009 and flashed back to 1960. However, this part of the comic talked a lot about the horrible things done to African Americans who were trying to peacefully gain racial equality simply by trying to buy movie tickets or sitting down in an all white restaurant. None of these ended well because a lot of African Americans were arrested and beat up very badly. In addition, when the African American’s sat in an all white restaurant, they were locked in there while a fumigator going off which was used to kill pests. If that doesn’t show how cruel these white people were, I don’t know what will. I feel like the main part of this section was about freedom riders where a group of African Americans and even a couple of white people traveled from Washington D.C. all the way to New Orleans. One thing that caught my eye was that these freedom riders passed through Farmville which I thought was pretty interesting. However, this was not an ordinary trip. These people signed wills not knowing if they would make it back home from the South. A lot of African Americans and white people who were freedom riders were beat up and arrested after having their buses lit on fire by white supremacists. Lastly, I have learned and heard about the Freedom Riders in the past but never knew that John Lewis was a part of it nor did I know that there were white people included in this as well. If I could find anything good out of this, I was happy that these Freedom Riders had at least some white people on their side to help them fight for racial equality.