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Because of Lewis, I got my first chance to protest my city’s and region’s racist policies and practices — from where we could eat, work, live, go to school, swim, party, play sports and even use the taxpayer-funded public restrooms.
I had been volunteering after school at a house near 21st Avenue North and Jefferson Street, where students gathered to ready themselves for the next march downtown. I was helping staple and paste posters. This would have been in late 1961 or early 1962. There was talk among the organizers one day about the next march. I went home and asked my mother if I could march. I told her the march would go right up Jefferson Street, the main road through black Nashville, as if she didn’t know already, adding that I would be okay.
For the thousands of college students who converged upon Nashville year-round, Jefferson Street was the place to be. It started at the campus of Tennessee A & I State University (now Tennessee State University) on the near west side of town. The march would stream along Jefferson’s retail merchants, dry cleaners, laundries, bars, grocery stores, nightclubs, beauty and barber shops, pass Fisk University and Meharry Medical College campuses, and then stream past churches and funeral homes as the marchers’ route made a right turn toward downtown.
Once downtown, there was McClellan’s Five & 10, Woolworth’s, S.H. Kress 5 and Dime, H.L. Green’s 5 & 10, stores with “whites-only” lunch counters. Along the way was the cluster of local government buildings. Collectively, all of those places were just three miles from Tennessee State’s campus, making the student march a brisk 30-minute walk.
The code of conduct for the marchers and their peers was to be neat and clean, to walk orderly, chant peacefully and remember violence was strictly prohibited regardless of circumstances. I did not know of the “sit-in” classes to prepare them for the potential abuse ahead. I would coin a phrase later to characterize what the marchers were hoping to do with their nonviolent assault on racism: kill it with kindness.
My mom, having seen on TV every afternoon the students from Tennessee State, Meharry and Fisk get arrested and beaten when they got downtown, told me she didn’t think I should go. End of discussion. My dad, who had not yet gotten home from his job, knew nothing of my idea. Still, after school the next day, I ran up Jefferson, found John and explained my challenge.
He said he would come to my house with me and talk to my mom. Late afternoon, John Lewis, the student leader, came to our house and introduced himself. He and my mom had a talk. At this point, I was unusually quiet. On the back porch, John promised my mom he would make sure I would be okay if she let me march. She cautiously yielded. I could march! I got to march eight blocks. I was so happy for our cause and for me, too.
After we got to 18th and Jefferson, John got me back home. We could hear the marchers chanting as they moved further toward downtown, and my mother was happy we were safe and sound. By late afternoon, it was hard to tell who had gotten arrested or beaten that day. We would hear about that later, after bail had been raised to get the young people out of jail and hospitals had been checked to see if there were any people injured.
The intensity of the civil rights activities heightened during the weeks ahead. Early one morning, word spread that the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the prominent city councilman and civil rights attorney, had been bombed. That was almost directly across the alley from the house where I and other students had pasted and stapled posters.
I was so happy I had met John and had been able to go on the march. We kept in touch off and on since that day until he died last week. In the early 1980s, during my years as Atlanta bureau chief for the New York Times, I wrote a story about him. My editor, Paul Delaney, had me ask John, who was then head of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project, to go with me to report on recapping the Freedom Rides that challenged segregated travel. We would ride interstate buses on the initial part of the trip and drive the rest of the route. John agreed, blocking out three days for our bus ride starting in the Carolinas, transferring in Atlanta and then riding to Birmingham and picking up a rental car to visit Montgomery and Selma.
During the trip to Selma, John recognized the spot where the bus loaded with him and other Freedom Riders in the 1960s was halted by a group of angry white people who pelted and then torched the bus, which forced the passengers to exit as the bus burst into flames. He recalled that, as they scrambled for their lives, a young lady (they would learn later) living in a house along the road ran to the burning bus site with her folks’ permission to see if she could help the injured.
On our trip, John said he had never been back to the house to thank the family, and he wondered if they were still there. We visited the family and John met the mother, who called her daughter on the phone, and John got the chance to talk with her.
The last time I saw John was in 2018 at the Washington National Cathedral memorial for journalist Simeon Booker, Washington bureau chief for Ebony and Jet magazines. I could tell John was on the homestretch. We had a good brief talk. He was the same John Lewis I recalled from my childhood years and encounters since. As the funeral crowd swirled around us, we talked on and on about life, his son, chickens, the tasks ahead and what needed to be done next.
As one of the old church prayers says, he has gone into his room to come out no more. The trail he blazed and left behind was a great one. I will always remember John Lewis talking with my mom on the back porch, “Mrs. Stuart, I will take care of Reggie. I will make sure nothing happens to him.”
