March: Book One Wins Robert F. Kennedy Award

The first volume of Congressman and civil rights movement hero John Lewis’s memoir has won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Award:

 The RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights has announced that March: Book One, the first volume ofCongressman John Lewis‘ civil rights memoir co-written withAndrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell, will receive a “Special Recognition” award at the 2014 Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards, to be awarded in a ceremony tomorrow night, May 22, in Washington, D.C.

Fittingly for an icon of the civil rights movement, this will be Congressman Lewis’ second honor from the RFK Book Awards; his prose autobiography Walking with the Wind won in 1999. The awards, founded in 1980, celebrate those books which best reflect the late Senator Kennedy’s ideals of justice, human rights, and equality of opportunity. In his capacity as attorney general, senator, and presidential candidate, Kennedy played a significant role in the civil rights movement throughout the 60s, and indeed will appear in the forthcoming second and third volumes of March.

March: Book One is one of the best graphic novels to come out in the last five years, a visually beautiful and almost unbearably moving account of the early days of Lewis’s involvement with the civil rights movement, filled with little visual details that illustrate the lived reality of Jim Crow with far more power than words could do alone.