Robert Treadway: Lex’s accidental historian
gave only photographic record of movement

Seventh in a series

Calvert McCann, the teenage amateur photographer who became Lexington’s accidental historian of the Civil Rights Movement, provided us with beautiful photographs of the marches and sit-ins of the local movement – the only photographic record we have of that period, in fact. Today, we talk a bit about the civil rights movement in Lexington, and of Calvert’s role in it. We also learn the identity of Calvert’s own local hero of the movement.

Calvert’s interest in photography began at an early age. He used to crack me up with stories of setting up a photo darkroom with his brother in their home’s one bathroom. Which didn’t sit well with his sisters. “Oooh, they would scream!” Calvert laughs. “‘Let us in, let us in!’ And we would say, ‘Another 30 seconds in the solution!’ We had to keep it dark while we worked with the film and paper.”

Calvert honed his darkroom skills at Michael’s Camera Shop, in downtown Lexington. Michael’s was a full-service photo processor, and ironically, often processed black and white film for the Herald and the Leader, whose offices were nearby. Calvert learned to use the film developing machines in the back, and to make prints from negatives. Calvert bristles to this day at the discrimination he faced at work. He worked in the back of the store, doing darkroom work, while the white college students hired for the summer waited on customers in the front. “Occasionally they’d let me wait on a customer, but not much,” Calvert said. “They were afraid white customers wouldn’t want to hand money to a black person.”

It wasn’t an issue of anyone’s questioning Calvert’s honesty; at the end of each shift, the manager would sack up the cash received during the day, and give it all to Calvert to drop in the night depository on his way home. “I left there with all the money every day, and they wouldn’t let me take a dollar bill from a white customer.”

That night deposit almost got Calvert into trouble once. “We always dressed up for these protest marches because we wanted to look good, to be respectable,” Calvert said, “so after work, one night there was going to be a protest, I rushed straight home to change clothes and forgot to make the deposit.”

He had left the bag of money at home. That happened to be one of the nights that the Lexington police arrested protestors, and Calvert had to spend part of the night in jail. I can’t confirm this, but my old law partner, then County Judge Joe Johnson, himself the subject of one of my profiles, claimed to have sprung them all.

“The police told me they had them locked up for suspicion,” Joe told me not long before he died. “I yelled, ‘Suspicion of what?’ When they couldn’t think of an answer, I said ‘Turn ‘em all loose.’”

“All I could think about was that money sitting at home,” Calvert remembered. “I thought they’d think I had stolen it if it didn’t end up in the bank by the next morning.” Luckily his father, James McCann, found the money, and made the deposit, with no one the wiser.

As early as July of 1959, according to research by University of Kentucky Historian Gerald L. Smith, there were sit-ins at lunch counters and restaurants in Lexington, earlier than most other cities. Calvert joined in these protests, and also took pictures of them, some of which are published in Smith’s pictorial history, “Black Lexington,” a part of the Black America series.

Calvert said that a group of African Americans, or a mixed group, would sit at a table or at the lunch counter. At first, the workers were polite, merely ignoring the protestors, thinking that they would grow tired of sitting without food or drink, and go home.

But the politeness didn’t last long.

“Oh, they poured hot coffee on us, they did everything they could,” Calvert remembered. “It was horrible. But we stayed.” One of the more genteel places they sat in was the coffee shop in the old Phoenix Hotel, then Lexington’s finest hotel.

Many of these protests and sit-in were lead by Calvert’s own personal hero of the local civil rights movement: the late Julia Lewis, a nurse, who led the local chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, the group with which Calvert personally most identified.

Don Pratt joined Calvert and me and some of our friends at Joe B’s for dinner the other night, and I undertook to interview Calvert for this article. I learned years ago that when you interview anyone in the same room with Don Pratt, you end up interviewing Don, too. When Calvert told us his pick, Don said, “She would be my hero, too.” Why?

Don said that she was like the people who had shown up to protest mountaintop removal in Frankfort the day after the big “I love the mountains” day, as well as on the day itself. Calvert suggested that Julia Lewis was that hypothetical parishioner who always shows up on the Sunday after Easter, whom any pastor will tell you, does the real work of the church. Calvert described her as being at every march, every sit-in, and every protest, usually in the lead.

Once on a car trip with Calvert, I played the SNCC Singers’ version of “Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom,” and he knew all the words. “Julia Lewis made us sing that song at every meeting,” he laughed. He described her as a tireless leader, who fought with the handicaps of being not only black, but a woman, in a society run by white men. “She used to cry,” Calvert said. “It was so hard. But we kept on. You should write a profile on her.” Lewis passed away in 1998.

“I have been to meetings in the sixties,” Don recalled, “Where it was just me and maybe another person, and her. But she was always there. You should write a profile on her.”

OK, I will. Tomorrow I will look at Calvert’s life after the civil rights movement, and his 2004 rediscovery as Lexington’s accidental historian of the civil rights movement. And we might say another word about Julia Lewis, too.

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.