One Book, One Community: A Welcome Choice at a Critical Time

I was more than pleased to see the 2018 selection of  March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell as the community's One Book at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico. It felt like a welcome choice for so many reasons.It was a comic book that influenced the young John Lewis, at a time when comic books were largely viewed as evil influences upon the young. Aydin writes about this in his article on the historical context of March:

Congress, never one to miss a bandwagon, held its hearings on the connection between comic books and juvenile delinquency.

Then, as now,  Congress seemed to have kind of missed the point of what will count as progress in the relentless sweep of history.In our time, the unthinkable has happened. This from the New Yorker:

Literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, once the most common mechanisms for disadvantaging minority voters, have been consigned to the history books, but one need look no further than the governor’s race in Georgia to see their modern equivalents in action.

Which is why I'm happy to see that in San Juan County, far from the halls of power, people will be reading Lewis's powerful book. Everyone reading it should think about what it means now.