When Donald Trump went after Civil Rights hero John Lewis on Twitter (absurdly declaring the progressive stalwart to be “all talk”) on Martin Luther King Day weekend no less, decent people with any sense of recent historical memory were appalled.
To show their support for the longtime congressman who was the youngest speaker at the 1963 Washington, D.C. March on Washington with Martin Luther King, book buyers took action, propelling both Lewis’s graphic novel trilogy (co written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell) and his memoir up the bestseller charts. The Guardian crunched the numbers on Amazon:
March, Lewis’s graphic novel about the US civil rights movement, shot from 451st place in the overall bestseller lists to No 1, while his memoir Walking the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement rose a vertiginous 8,699 places to No 2. Further down the charts, his 2012 book Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, which recounted lessons learned as an activist, leapt from 34,480 to 175 in the overall bestseller list on Amazon.com and took top spot on the online bookseller’s philosophy of ethics and morality chart. All three were holding their places on Monday as fury over the tweets grew…
The third installment of March netted a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the first for a graphic novel.