March: Book One

This section first reveals a quiet street on January 20, 2009, in Washington, DC, John Lewis awakens in his home and turns on the TV as a news anchor emphasizes the importance of this day in the country’s history. Today is the day Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the first Black president of the United States. Lewis gets in the shower and sings, “Oh Freedom.”

The next section shows the Cannon House Office Building. Lewis enters his office and is greeted by his older sister Rosa. A woman enters with two little boys. She brought her sons from Atlanta for the inauguration, and she wanted them to see John Lewis’s office. He ushers them in and shows them around. One of the boys asks Lewis why he has so many chicken knick-knacks in the room.

The illustrations change and pull the reader away from the office in Washington, DC, revealing Lewis as a young boy on the farm. His family lived on 110 acres of farmland in Pike County, Alabama. Lewis’s father, a sharecropper, bought the farm in 1940 for $300. As a boy, Lewis talked to the chickens before he fed them. He could tell them apart and knew their personalities.