I went on to write my graduate thesis on the ["Montgomery Story"] comic book itself. It was the first long-form history that was ever written about it. And it's how I found out Martin Luther King actually helped edit "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story."

You cannot understand the politics of today without understanding the Civil Rights Movement and the role it played in our society.

I think ['March'] is not just for the Black Lives Matter movement. It's for everyone. We all have to understand what happened then, so we can understand what's happening now.

So March: Book One was the first book I ever wrote. And it was the most terrifying process I've ever been through.

Nothing surprised me more, and meant more to me, than seeing an entire class of ninth graders mob Congressman [John] Lewis at a book festival.

I spent 10 years in professional politics and eight writing comics, and so I look at it from both sides. I don't understand the logic in being frustrated with a system, so you choose to be a part of the reason why the system is so frustrating. If everybody voted, it wouldn't be this way.

I spent almost two years working on this book ['March'] before we ever had a publisher, before we ever had a title. And when you're reading it, and you're writing it, and you're ingesting it, sometimes a single word just comes up over and over and over again. And if you're trying to capture the essence of what it is you're trying to tell, you don't have a whole lot of space.