Robert Treadway: Calvert McCann was
photographer of Lex’s Civil Rights era

Sixth of a series

A still-living hero of the civil rights movement in Lexington who is still living, Calvert McCann was a teenager in the early ’60s when a wave of sit-ins at lunch counters and restaurants all over the South began. Among the first sit-ins occurred at lunch counters in downtown Lexington.

Calvert was also an amateur photographer. We are all lucky that he was, because his photographs became the only pictorial history we have of this era in Lexington’s struggle for civil rights, earning him the title the accidental historian of the civil rights movement. The news media, and in particular the Lexington Herald and Leader, studiously avoided reporting on the movement at all.

In this first part, I will introduce Calvert and set the scene of Lexington in that era. In the subsequent segments, I will describe the marches and sit-ins in which Calvert participated and photographed, and his life after the civil rights movement, including his service in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and his rediscovery in 2004 by the world. In that year, Calvert’s photographs were rediscovered, and I remember to this day seeing one of them on the front page of the New York Times, being held up by the anchorman of a national newscast on prime time TV. Not bad for an accidental historian. I used to tease him that I knew he spoke Italian because I had seen an interview with him, in Italian, in Italian Vogue. He was not amused.

First, why did we need an amateur photographer to take these pictures? Where were the professionals? They had been told to stay home. The Herald and the Leader, under the same management, absolutely refused to print any positive news whatsoever about the civil rights movement. The publisher, Fred Wachs, claimed to be an integrationist, but showed little stomach for it.

In those days, journalism was segregated, too. Only one column in the newspaper, a weekly article called “Colored Notes” reported on activities in the black community. They still published Colored Notes in the Lexington paper when I was growing up, and no one thought anything about it.

The column was written by Gertrude Morbley for years. She is often identified in news reports as the “newsroom’s only black employee,” but few knew who she was. “She was the elevator operator,” Calvert said, with a chuckle. “And she was our only presence in the newspaper. And they got the elevator operator to write it.” But she was a devoted reporter as well, and dutifully reported church events, political meetings, and social events in the African American community. As Calvert said, it wasn’t much, but it was all they had.

The reporters and photographers who rode up and down those elevators in what was generally regarded as the ugliest building in Lexington (I wrote my first story on a word processor in that same ugly building, 20 years later, by which time the elevators had no human operators) were told by their editors that they had been told by their publisher not to cover what “management” perceived as a threat by “outside agitators.”

But Calvert, a teenager working part time at a photo store, was there with his Pentax. His photographs, in black and white, in a style that evokes the street photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, are eerily beautiful; Calvert captured many decisive moments. They are eerily beautiful little time machines.

It is one thing to see a photograph of a demonstration in Washington, DC, or New York, but it’s quite another to see Calvert’s photographs of lines of men and women, black and white, though mostly black, dressed in suits and ties and formal overcoats and hats, and Sunday dresses, marching in a perfect straight line down Main Street Lexington, with the Kentucky Theatre (which was then restricted to whites) in the background. And that’s the one, by the way, that made its way onto the front page of the New York Times, and on CNN, and in Italian Vogue, and finally, into history.

Tomorrow: the marches and the sit-ins, and Calvert’s answer to: “Which local civil rights leader is YOUR hero?” The answer might surprise you.

Robert L. Treadway is senior policy analyst at Kentucky First Strategies, LLC, a full service political consulting, lobbying, and governmental relations firm. In his role as a legal consultant, he also provides legal research and writing services to attorneys and law firms throughout Kentucky. Bob has a life long interest in Kentucky history, which he pursued as a student at Transylvania University, where he graduated with a major in history and minor in political science, and was an award winning editor of Transy’s student newspaper, The Rambler. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where his media activities included scriptwriting for Harvard Law Professor Arthur Miller’s TV series, and for Prof. Miller’s role as Legal Editor on ABC TV’s Good Morning, America. He writes, posts, and Tweets about Kentucky history. Look him up on Facebook; his Twitter feed is @rltreadway.