Rep John Lewis was looking for an orange to carry in his bag. He wanted to pack two books, a toothbrush, toothpaste, an apple, and an orange inside his backpack, just as he did in 1965, when he led a vanguard of about 600 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Lewis had already purchased a jacket and backpack similar to the ones he had worn half a century earlier on the Selma march to Montgomery, Alabama, although it took months and trips to various second-hand stores to find them. Orange was the only piece missing to complete his costume of himself at Comic-Con International 2015 in San Diego, recalled a helper, Andrew Aydin, 36.
“It was a complete recreation,” said Mr. Aydin, policy advisor and digital director for Mr. Lewis, in an interview.
Photos of Mr. Lewis walking through the convention center, dressing up as his younger self, with the same determined expression he had in Selma when he was 25, began circulating on social media after the congressman died on Friday. “John Lewis was a giant and a moral compass,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the tens of thousands of people who shared a tweet from the images that day.
Lewis was at Comic-Con that day to promote “March,” a three-part graphic novel memoir that he wrote with Mr. Aydin and artist Nate Powell. The second book in the trilogy had been released a few months earlier, and Lewis was in San Diego to promote it. He would return again in 2016 and 2017, and recreated the march on both occasions.
His goal that day in 2015 was to help children understand that you don’t need superpowers to be a hero, Aydin said.
“He was trying to show them how his faith and belief in the United States fundamentally put him in a position where they would see him as a hero,” said Aydin.
The congressman said it was “another children’s march, as they called it in Alabama,” Aydin said.
Mr. Lewis walked the half-mile distance from a panel room to his cabin with the children, and others joined as they passed. When Mr. Lewis noticed, there were about 1,000 people following him, Mr. Aydin said.
“‘This is almost too much,'” Mr. Aydin recalled what Mr. Lewis said. “It’s his way of saying that this is something really extraordinary.”
In a 2015 interview with CBS News, Lewis called the moment “unreal.”
“I walked with young children, wonderful young children. We headed to the convention center floor. And it was unreal, incredible. And this crowd of people just walking with us, “he said.
The children were third graders at Oak Park Elementary in San Diego, and they were learning about the civil rights movement from Mr. Lewis’s book. His teacher, Mick Rabin, an avid comic book fan, used it to teach his students about other figures in the movement. But at Comic-Con, students only had eyes for the congressman, even when people dressed as Spider-Man and Wonder Woman passed by, Rabin said.
“The kids went crazy,” said Rabin. “They knew who he was because they had read him in the comic and he was wearing the same thing.”
The idea for the book had started almost a decade earlier, in 2008. When Mr. Aydin, a longtime comic fanatic, admitted to office staff that he would be going to Comic-Con after working hard hours during the re-election of Mr. Lewis. campaign, his colleagues laughed, but not Mr. Lewis.
“‘Don’t laugh,'” Mr. Aydin recalled telling staff, before reminding them of a 1957 comic that was popular in the civil rights movement, “Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story.”
That conversation eventually led to the “March” trilogy.
“We would stay awake and I would interview him,” Mr. Aydin said of his writing process. “I would ask him questions and he would fall asleep.”
The first in the series, “March: Book One,” published in 2013, became a New York Times best seller. Mr. Lewis cried when he found out about that, Mr. Aydin said. The second, in 2015, won an Eisner Prize at Comic-Con, and the third, published in 2016, won the National Book Prize for youth literature.
In a 2013 appearance on “The Colbert Report,” Mr. Lewis spoke about how inspired he was by the Martin Luther King comic.
“I read it and reread it, and this book inspired me,” said Lewis. “He became my hero, my inspiration, my leader. It inspired me to say no to segregation and racial discrimination. “
Rabin said Lewis had a similar effect on his students in 2015.
“My students who walked with him that day were transformed forever,” said Rabin. “They were really paralyzed by that interaction.”
