Justice
2021
How I Came to Have an Autographed Photo of John Lewis j a c q u e ly n m a l o n e
M
y admiration—indeed, my awe—of John Lewis goes back to the 1960s when he was hardly out of his teens. His first act of civil disobedience occurred in Nashville, Tennessee, the place I consider my hometown (though I’ve lived in Lowell longer than any other locale). My mother was the reason I came to follow him in the newspapers. She worked at Harvey’s, the largest department store in the South and a Nashville institution that brought tourists, Black and white, from all over the mid-South to ride the merry-goround in the infant’s department and to watch the monkeys nearby. The monkey bar had a huge room-sized cage with four monkeys that entertained audiences by swinging from synthetic trees, howling, and mugging for their audiences. There were also large cages of mynah birds. Occasionally one would startlingly and pitifully cry “Help!” in a small child’s voice. (The story went that a little boy became separated from his mother.) And there were antique merry-go-round horses all over the store, especially beside the escalators, pointing either up or down. Blacks were free to visit. And to buy. But they were not allowed to sit at the Harvey’s lunch counters, as they weren’t free to sit at any counter of a white-owned business in Nashville. But the city was a perfect breeding ground for young civil rights activists. It was the home of four Black-only institutions of higher learning: Fisk University, American Baptist College, Tennessee A & I, and Meharry Medical College. It was a perfect place also for James Lawson, a young man who had been to India to study Gandhian non-violence. He established a group from all four schools that met regularly to discuss non-violent protests. It was this group, including a young John Lewis, that showed up at Harvey’s to sit-in at the lunch counter beside the children’s department that my mother worked in. According to David Halberstam, who wrote a book about the beginning of the civil rights movement in Nashville called The Children, they were turned away politely at Harvey’s, unlike the protesters at the other large department store in town, Cain-Sloan’s, where they were treated with contempt and physically forced from the counter. But my mom was upset. A lifelong Southerner, she still didn’t understand why they had to leave. From the large department stores the protests spread to the lunch counters at Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, and other downtown retailers where young activists like Lewis The Lowell Review
33
