From Alabama to Tahrir Square

Abstract

The history of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s provides ample opportunity to understand how groups use mass media to build and sustain social movements. This article examines an understudied but important piece of movement literature, the “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story” comic, which simultaneously provided an “origin story” for the modern movement and a step-by-step guide to nonviolent action. Young activists such as Congressman John Lewis, a college student when “The Montgomery Story” was published in 1957, called the comic the “Bible of the movement.” The comic would later surface in South Africa, in Latin America translated into Spanish and, after a translation into Arabic, on Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011. Through letters and archival documents, the article explores the creation and distribution of the comic and its usefulness as a compact and simplified “movement narrative” that was adapted to use in other social movements.

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J. Michael Lyons

J. MICHAEL LYONS is an assistant professor and founding faculty member in the department of communication studies at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He studies the use of narrative and media in social movements.