Jacquelyn Malone How I Came to Have an Autographed Photo of John Lewis

How I Came to Have an Autographed Photo of John Lewis

jacquelyn malone

My 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

were beaten and arrested. Nashville was in the national news for weeks. The whole of downtown was filled with agitation, and my mother came home each night, distressed by the violence and disturbed that she was too frightened to express her solidarity with the students.

She wasn’t the only one. Nashville was, in some ways, chosen as a testing ground. It was a border state where there were more moderate voters than in the Deep South. The poll tax law, prevalent in the South, had been repealed and as a result the state had many Black voters. Nashville also had a moderate mayor, Ben West, as well as a progressive newspaper, The Tennessean. As it turned out, it had a moderate store owner, too. Fred Harvey and the executives of his store worked with the mayor and others in bringing an end to white-only lunch counters.

It was my mother’s dismay and her emotional solidarity with the students that left an indelible mark on me. As I followed the news and became active in civil rights activities myself, I began to hear again and again the name John Lewis: as he was arrested at lunchcounter sit-ins, as he participated with the Freedom Riders, as he spoke at the March on Washington, as his skull was fractured by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and as he worked in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Finally, he became a Congressman from Georgia.

So it was somewhat amazing that, when I was volunteering in the Elizabeth Warren U.S. Senate race, I met a young man from Atlanta. I asked him why he was working in a Massachusetts election. He said his boss wanted to see Warren elected. So I asked him, “Who’s your boss?” When he said, “John Lewis,” I blurted out, “John Lewis! He’s my hero!”

Two weeks after our conversation, I received an autographed photo of Lewis standing before the Capitol wearing the Medal of Freedom awarded to him by President Obama. His message to me: “Keep the faith!”

[Congressman John Robert Lewis (Feb. 21, 1940–July, 2020) said, “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.”]