Run: Book One

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Illustr. Nate Powell, Illustr. L. Fury

Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | YA | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-38

Pages 39-77

Pages 78-115

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Key Figures

John Lewis

Known as the “conscience of Congress,” John Lewis was a civil rights activist and Congressman who served as the representative of Georgia’s 5th district (which includes most of Atlanta) from 1987 until he died in 2020. Born to Alabama sharecroppers in 1940, he grew up dreaming of being a preacher, but he also closely followed the civil rights movement, meeting both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. while still a teenager. As a student at the historically black American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, Tennessee, Lewis joined the student movement seeking to desegregate downtown lunch counters, echoing the famous “sit-in” campaign months earlier in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lewis’s efforts with the Nashville student movement led to his co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an umbrella of student movements challenging segregation throughout the Jim Crow South.

With the SNCC, Lewis participated in nearly every major civil rights campaign of the early 1960s, beginning as one of the original “Freedom Riders” traveling through the Deep South to challenge segregation on buses and bus terminals. After being elected chairman of SNCC in 1963, he was one of the “Big Six” leaders of civil rights organizations leading the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. His most significant moment as a civil rights leader came in June 1965, when he led the first attempt to march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, suffering a brutal attack from police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which would go down in history as “Bloody Sunday.” Arrested 40 times, he famously called for getting into “good trouble, necessary trouble.” In 2011, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award for a civilian, and he died of pancreatic cancer in 2020 while voicing support for the protests following the murder of George Floyd.

Julian Bond

Julian Bond was a major civil rights activist who most famously served as the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the most historic and distinguished civil rights organizations in the United States, from 1998 to 2010. His father Horace Mann Bond was a respected historian who served as the president of several historically Black colleges and universities. Julian Bond grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, also the alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr. He left college early to take part in student demonstrations against segregation, becoming a co-founder (along with John Lewis) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He and Lewis were close but disagreed on certain points, particularly the role of white staffers in the organization, whom he felt interfered with the goal of elevating Black leaders. Shortly after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bond ran for a seat in the Georgia General Assembly and won, but as described in Run, the legislature refused to seat him when he took a stand against the Vietnam War and the draft. He ultimately took his seat in 1967 and later served in the Georgia Senate. Bond also co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group famous for its cases against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. Bond became chairman of the NAACP in 1998 and gained national prominence as a fierce critic of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War. He retired from his position in 2010 and died in 2015 at the age of 75.

Stokely Carmichael

In March, Carmichael is a foil to Lewis, someone whom Lewis respects but disagrees with sharply. By the end of the first volume of Run, he has evolved into an antagonist. Born in 1941 on the island of Trinidad, he moved to New York as a child and as a high schooler was involved in protests against segregation in Woolworth’s department stores. As a college student at Howard University in Washington, DC, he became affiliated with the SNCC and took part in many of its signature campaigns, including the Freedom Rides, seeking to desegregate interstate public transit. He also worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the segregationist Democrats in the 1964 convention. When the party refused to seat them, Carmichael came to doubt the wisdom of relying on the mainstream political system, as well as the nonviolent tactics that had traditionally defined the movement. Despite these reservations, in 1965 Carmichael continued his work in registering Black voters, focusing his efforts on Lowndes County, Alabama. Carmichael participated in the formation of an organization called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, adopting the mascot of a black panther, which in turn would inspire the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, the following year. That same year, Carmichael took over the SNCC from John Lewis and helped popularize the concept of “Black Power,” becoming particularly interested in the linkage of civil rights with anti-colonial struggles around the world. Beginning in the late 1960s, he spent much time in Africa and focused on issues of Pan-African unity, adopting the name Kwame Ture in 1978 in honor of African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure. He died in 1998 of prostate cancer at the age of 57.