Robert Treadway: Calvert McCann carried
his camera along on sit-ins and marches

Eighth of a Series

Photographer Calvert McCann, the “accidental” historian, is such a personal favorite of my heroes of the Civil Rights movement that I have devoted three columns to his story. Calvert is still living, though in poor health, in Lexington.

Today, we follow Calvert from Lexington where he honed his photographic skills in the back room of a photo store, to Montgomery, Alabama, and Washington, DC, where he marched with Dr. King, and from there to Africa, where he volunteered in the Peace Corps. Calvert settled back down in Lexington, where he has lived ever since. In 2004, when his photographs were discovered for the first time by scholars and journalists, he was recognized as Lexington’s accidental historian of the Civil Rights movement.

In 1960, young demonstrators, black and white, took to the streets and the lunch counters of downtown Lexington. Calvert McCann was a high school student who had developed an interest in photography while working part time at Michael’s Camera Store in downtown Lexington. So, when he and his friends demonstrated or sat in at a lunch counter, he had his camera with him. The fact that no one else was taking pictures of these events made Calvert Lexington’s accidental historian of the civil rights movement.

Inspired by his experiences in Lexington, Calvert joined the national Civil Rights movemen, and marched with Martin Luther King in his famous Poor People’s March on Washington. Calvert was there, in a good seat near the front, when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. “I had fallen asleep,” Calvert told me once. “We had walked a long time, and it was hot, and I probably hadn’t had much sleep, but when he said, ‘I have a dream,’ I woke up!”

Calvert traveled with Dr. King and his right hand man, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, from Louisville, where Dr. King’s brother, Rev. Michael King, was pastor. They had a harrowing flight to Montgomery. “The plane had trouble, and they thought they were going to have to make an emergency landing, and Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy, and everyone, were on the floor praying,” Calvert said. “And I was, too!”

When they got there, it wasn’t much better. “They had their Confederate flags on their uniforms,” Calvert said of white Alabama national guardsmen sent to “protect” the marchers. “One of them pointed his rifle right at me, and mimicked pulling the trigger.”

Calvert pursued his education first at the famous Tuskegee Institute, to Kentucky State, to the University of Kentucky, to the University of Texas at Austin, and to the University of Wisconsin. “It was cold in Wisconsin,” Calvert remembered, after all these years. “But we had a demonstration, and it was in the middle of the winter, and someone threw a snowball and hit a policeman, and they thought it was me.” He still laughs as he talks about hearing himself referred to as an “outside agitator” on the Madison police radios and running from the police.

By the middle of the ’60s, most overt segregation had ended in Lexington, and the national civil rights movement was in full swing. Rather than join it, Calvert joined the Peace Corps.

“We were very excited to be the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to go to Nigeria,” Calvert said. His experience of being a rural agricultural advisor has stayed with him to this day, even if there were experiences he’d as soon forget.

“Snakes,” he says, in that Indiana Jones tone. “The snakes would come up through the bathrooms.” One day a cobra came up through his bathroom, and into the house. “That thing reared up with that big hood, and I about made a new door in the house.” The bugs were big, too. “Spiders, giant centipedes, you name it. You know, the biggest reason people panicked and left early was the bugs.”

Bugs aside, the experience gave him an appreciation of African nationalism that informs his views to this day. His view of the aftermath of colonialism led him to study sociology when he returned to Kentucky, and to work as a social worker for the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government, from which he retired.

Calvert comes from a talented family. His brother, Les McCann, now retired in California, was a jazz star of the ’60s, and ’70s. The first time I put “Stormy Monday” in the car stereo for Calvert, I didn’t know his brother was playing piano on it. Les McCann’s great hit during the Vietnam War was a protest song called, “Compared to What?”

And that’s pretty well where things stood in 2004. Calvert was quietly retired in Lexington, and no one was thinking of things that had happened 40 years earlier. Well, no one other than the newspaper that had failed to cover it the first time.

On the Fourth of July, 2004, the Lexington Herald Leader shocked the nation when it ran a front-page article whose lead said: “It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.”

The paper published a special series of articles. Among those profiled: Calvert McCann, whose photographs had been discovered recently by UK Historian Raymond Smith. “Somebody told Dr. Smith that I had some old pictures,” Calvert laughed. “And you see what it mushroomed into.”

What it mushroomed into was a flurry of international publicity, recognizing Calvert for his role in documenting the history of the Civil Rights movement in Lexington. I said in the first article that I used to tease Calvert about having been interviewed in Italian for Italian Vogue, but I really did see the article. Magazines in Europe and Asia ran articles about Calvert and reproduced some of his photographs. The University of Kentucky purchased some photographs for its permanent collection.

But Calvert’s life didn’t change much. He lived in the same house he grew up in, in the East End neighborhood. He read his books on African nationalism, and went to his international movies at the Kentucky Theatre. And he lived to see something he never thought he would see: An African American president.

Last summer a tumor the size of a small orange was removed from Calvert’s brain. The tumor was not malignant, but the after effects of the surgery have left him weak and largely unable to walk. The man who marched in Lexington, and Frankfort, and Washington, and Montgomery lives in a nursing home now and struggles to march from one end of the hall to the other.

But when he does, everyone knows who he is. This fall, his nursing home, Bluegrass Care and Rehabilitation, inducted him into its Honor Roll of Residents. His photographs were shown, and his story told, to a large gathering at the home, and his plaque is on the wall. And when they began his presentation, we all teared up a bit as the strains of “We Shall Overcome . . . ” once again filled the air.

Calvert McCann, Lexington’s own accidental historian of the civil rights movement is not only my friend, he’s one of my heroes. Yesterday I shared Calvert’s own pick as his hero of the local civil rights movement, Julia Lewis, the local head of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, which sponsored many of the protests of the ’60s, as our series of profiles in honor of Black History Month continues.

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 lifelong 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.