March stages the civil rights movement not only as a struggle over legal rights, but as a confrontation with economic structures that reproduce racial inequality. The trilogy repeatedly links segregation and voter suppression to labor exploitation, from scenes of waiting-room signs and segregated job advertisements, to depictions of barefoot children and crowded housing. Read through a Marxist lens, John Lewis's moral appeals to conscience and nonviolence operate within, and sometimes against, a larger conflict over material distribution, where political rights are necessary but insufficient for altering class relations. Textual evidence strengthens this claim, for example panels showing striking workers, references to tenant evictions, and conversations about poverty among Black sharecroppers and urban workers. The visual austerity of Nate Powell's art emphasizes scarcity, while Andrew Aydin's scripting connects sit-ins and voter drives to demands for economic dignity. Theoretically, this take draws on Marxist analyses of ideology and base-superstructure relations, suggesting the movement's civil and legal victories must be read in relation to capitalist imperatives that absorb reform while preserving class hierarchies.

March foregrounds many women who were essential to organizing, yet the narrative centers John Lewis as protagonist, creating space to examine how gender shapes memory and recognition. Feminist criticism highlights scenes featuring Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other women, asking how the text represents their political labor, moral authority, and sometimes marginalization within movement hierarchies. The trilogy invites questions about leadership models, care labor, and the gendered division of emotional and logistical work that sustained protests and voter registration drives. Specific panels and dialog show women leading strategy sessions, running classrooms to educate new voters, and enduring brutality. A feminist framework here draws on intersectional approaches, especially Black feminist thought, to analyze how race and gender combine to shape visibility and voice. Teachers can use these moments to ask whether March re-centers women sufficiently, or whether the graphic memoir reproduces familiar patterns of male-centered narrative even as it honors women's contributions.

Viewed through postcolonial theory, March frames African American life as subject to internal colonial dynamics, where state power, spatial segregation, and surveillance reproduce conditions similar to empire. The trilogy's geographic detail, from the rural South to northern cities, works like a map of imposed boundaries. Scenes of police violence, voter suppression, and state deployment of federal troops can be read as colonial techniques that police access to citizenship, property, and political voice. This interpretation leans on postcolonial concepts such as subalternity, mimicry, and settler colonialism, suggesting the civil rights movement was not only a struggle for legal inclusion but also a decolonial attempt to dismantle internal rule. Textual anchors include the recurrent presence of militarized law enforcement, the legal language used to deny rights, and visual contrasts between civic spaces that are accessible to white citizens and those that are off limits to Black communities. The postcolonial lens encourages students to compare US domestic racial regimes to international colonial structures and to consider how empire informs domestic policing and law.

Psychoanalytic criticism reads March as a work of memory that processes collective and personal trauma while shaping subjectivity. The trilogy frequently returns to formative images, such as the boyhood scenes on the farm, the emotional shock of encounters with white hostility, and the grief after violent episodes, suggesting an ongoing working-through of traumatic events. Lewis's commitment to nonviolence can be analyzed as both ethical choice and psychic defense, a way to contain rage and channel it into disciplined collective action. Emma Powell's stark visual rhythms and moment-to-moment framing help dramatize flashbacks, affective intensities, and the embodiment of pain. A psychoanalytic approach mobilizes concepts like mourning versus melancholia, transgenerational trauma, and the formation of political identity. Teachers can use this reading to explore how memory is narrated, how trauma is represented in visual form, and how personal history influences public action, always taking care to handle material about violence sensitively in class.

Queer theory opens March to readings of nonnormative intimacy, chosen family, and the politics of visibility that are not reducible to heteronormative frameworks. The movement's reliance on deep bonds among young activists, the intense physical proximity of nonviolent training, and intimate scenes between comrades create affective worlds that challenge public-private distinctions. At the same time, the trilogy rarely thematizes queer identities, which invites critique about the movement's normative assumptions concerning gender and sexual expression. Textual evidence includes scenes of close male friendship, sleeping in church basements, and the bodily discipline of training that creates forms of intimacy and dependency. A queer reading questions who is allowed to be seen as a full political subject within the narrative, and what labor is rendered invisible when heteronormativity is assumed. This is a provocative claim for classrooms, since it asks students to consider exclusions within movements that are often portrayed as unified. The approach is useful for discussing how social movements manage desire, privacy, and coalition building.