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The American South:Campaign for Civil Rights
INMARCH1936 Dr. Howard Thurman, an African American minister,
went toseeMohandas Gandhi in India, to ask him about nonviolent
action and what itcould do to end racial injustice in the United
States. The Indian leader'scampaigns in the 1920s and 1930s had
been teported carefully by leadingAmerican black journals and
newspapers, and black political and intellectualleaders such as
Marcus Garvey and W. E, B. DuBois had held up the Indianmovement as
a shining example to African Americans, So Dr. Thurman's visitwas
perhaps something of a pilgrimage.
When asked by the black minister ifhe regarded "non-violence" as
"a form ofdirect action," Gandhi was emphatic: "It is the greatest
and activist force in theworld."And he compared itspower to St.
Paul's idea oflove-revealing what madehim acompellin~ figure for
many blackAmericans, who had alwayslooked to theirreligious faith
for the strength with which to endure subordination. "Gandhi'spower
is a tribute to the life and teachings of the lowlyNazarene that we
conquer
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not so much by power and might asby a certain bent of spirit,"
the black journalistGordon Hancock wrote in The NO/folkIoumal and
Guide in 1932.
1
But some black observers had been equally impressed by the
practical lessonsof Gandhi's work. At the time of the 1921-1922
noncooperation campaign inIndia, a journalist for The Chicago
Defender foresaw public transit boycotts inAmerica to protest
segregation: "We believe that some empty ... cars will someday
worry our street car magnates in Southern cities when we get around
towalking rather than suffer insult and injury to our wives and
children.,,2
A year after his talk with Howard Thurman, Gandhi gave an
audience toDr. Channing Tobias and Dr. Benjamin Mays, two other
prominent AfricanAmericans, and told them that nonviolent action
"cannot be preached. It hasto be practiced"-and not only by
individuals, as if it were only a personalmoral choice. "It can be
practiced on a mass scale.,,3
As for resisting the use of violence, Gandhi conceded that
Hitler, Mussolini,and Stalin were even then showing "the immediate
effectiveness of violence,"but he confidently predicted that "it
will be as transitory as that of Ghenghis'slaughtk" referring to
the ancient Mongolian warlord whose empire had longago returned to
dust. Gandhi was certain that ultimately nonviolent actionwould
cause "the whole world" to stand agape and call it a miracle, even
thoughit was simply "the silent and effective working of invisible
forces."4
What was visible in America as he spoke, and what remained
blatant foranother thirty years, was not a miracle but a
monstrosity: the systematic andeven violent denial of the rights of
an entire race. The force of which Gandhispoke, however, would
change all that-on a mass scale.
In the fall of 1959 a young African American woman from the
South Side ofChicago named Diane Nash arrived in the capital city
of the state of Tennesseeto enroll at Fisk University, a
predominantly black institution. She had gone tocollege to "conquer
the world," but in the city of Nashville she found a societythat
kept her behind an invisible wall. Every time she ventured into
town, shecame face to facewith reminders that whites regarded her
as inferior. It happenedfirst when she went on a date to the
Tennessee State Fair and discovered thatshe had to use a separate
"colored" rest room-something she would not haveencountered up
north. When she went shopping downtown, she could not sitand eat
lunch, even at a store like Woolworth's-"we don't serve niggers
here,"
she was told. If she wanted a sandwich, she had to take it out
and eat it on thecurb, as she noticed other black people doing.
"And it was humiliating. I grewto hate segregation."5
Nash asked other students at Fisk whether they knew of anyone or
anythingthat was fighting segregation. "Be cool," they said. "You
aren't going to be ableto make any changes. You're just going to
get yourself in trouble. Why don'tyou just go to class during the
week and to the parties on the weekend?" Finallyshe asked Paul
LaPrad, a white student at Fisk. He said he knew a minister whowas
looking for students to attend workshops on nonviolent action.
Nashdecided to give it a try.G
The workshops were held on Tuesday evenings at a small Methodist
church.Most of those who attended were students enrolled at the
area's black colleges,though a few white students also participated
They learned about MohandasGandhi and satyagraha-that the anguish
of people acting to end oppressionwas a form of truth that might
change the minds and hearts of their oppressors.In role-playing
exercises they practiced taking physical and verbal abuse
withoutstriking back, and they learned how to shield their bodies
if attacked. Althoughno one outside their small group was paying
much attention, the students werepreparing for a frontal attack on
what was called Jim Crow, the system of racialhierarchy in the
American South.
James Lawson, a Methodist minister and graduate student at the
VanderbiltSchool of Divinity, was their teacher. This bespectacled,
thoughtful youngMrican American had been thirty years old when he
went to Nashville in 1958,but his antipathy to violence and his
dignity in the face of racism went back tohis boyhood in Ohio,
where he was raised by a gentle mother and a father whowas a
pistol-packing minister. As he grew up, these impulses had
becomedefining facets of a worldview in which Christian commands to
turn the othercheek were combined with a radical critique of racial
oppression. His buddingnonviolent militance had been reinforced by
fascination with news of Gandhi'sexploits in India, which Lawson
devoured in the black newspapers?
It was at Baldwin-Wallace College, a Methodist school in Ohio,
thatLawson had first seriously studied Gandhi's ideas. On a visit
to the campus,A. J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR)-an interfaith groupdedicated to peace and justice-struck up a
friendship with Lawson andintroduced him to Gandhi's writings and
the history of nonviolent action,including the Danes' resistance to
the Germans in World War II. Muste alsoput Lawson in contact with
other black leaders, such as Bayard Rustin andJames Farmer, who
were experimenting with Gandhian methods. Lawsonsubscribed to FOR's
magazine and also learned about Howard Thurman, theminister who had
met with Gandhi in 1936.
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Even earlier, Lawson had experimented with direct action
techniques thathe would teach to the Nashville students. While
still in high school, he and afriend had demanded to be served
inside a hamburger joint that made blackcustomers take their food
out. In college when he traveled to youth meetingsaround the
Midwest, he continued these personal raids against
discrimination,In his boldest act of defiance, the target was war
rather than racism, When U.S.forces were fighting in Korea-which
Lawson believed was wrong-he refusedto cooperate with his draft
board rather than apply for a ministerial defermentor conscientious
objector status. That refusal earned him a sentence of morethan a
year in federal prison.
After finishing his degree at Baldwin-Wallace, Lawson left for
India, wherehe served as a missionary at a college in the city ofN
agpur. Although his job wasto teach, Lawson had gone to India to
learn. In three years there, he undertookan intense investigation
of Gandhi and met with several of the Mahatma'sdisciples-coming to
believe, as had many other African Americans with far lessknowledge
of the Indian leader, that Gandhi's teachings and life mirrored
thespirit of Christ. Being a Gandhian and being a Christian, for
Lawson, becamemore or less the same thing}
In December 1955, while he was still in India, Lawson picked up
the NagpurTimes and read that black people in Montgomery, Alabama,
were boycottingthe city's segregated buses-hearing for the first
time about a minister almostexactly his own age, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Before going to India, Lawson hadthought about putting
Gandhian ideas to work fighting segregation in the South.Now, after
Montgomery, it seemed that ordinary black people might be readyto
join such a movement. Like India after World War I, the South
appeared ripefor a nonviolent liberation struggle.9
Lawson returned to America in 1956, going to Ohio, where he
studied for amaster's degree at Oberlin College. His goal was a
Ph.D. in theology, followed bywork for racialequality. But avisit
to Oberlin byMartin Luther King,Jr. in February1957 pried Lawson
away from his first priority. By then a recognized leader, Kinghad
gone to Oberlin to give speeches, but he also made time for a small
luncheonwith faculty and students. Lawson showed up, found King
sitting by himself at atable, and sat down opposite him. He told
King about his hitch in prison, his yearsin India, and his contacts
with some of the activistswho advised King-and howhe expected to go
down South after his studies. King asked him not to wait: Thecivil
rights movement needed Lawson immediately-there were no other
blackleaderswho reallyunderstood what was required in a nonviolent
campaign. Unableto resist this plea, Lawson found himself agreeing
to move South.1D
Lawson had kept up his ties to FOR, and he soon heard that they
werelooking to place a field secretary in the South. The job was a
good fit, and he
eventually decided to base himself in Nashville, where he could
study atVanderbilt (which had just begun admitting black graduate
students), In early1958 he boarded a bus in his hometown of
Masillon, Ohio, and headed downto lay nonviolent siege to the
haunted edifice of American racism.
When James Lawson arrived in Nashville, the southern civil
rights movementwas listing on its side. The separation of the races
and the exclusion of blacksfrom full citizenship-features of
Southern life that had crystallized around theturn of the
century-were coming under fire from all directions. But the
overallstructure was still intact in the late 1950s, and civil
rights workers disagreedabout how best to fight racist laws and
customs. It was also not cleat what rolenonviolent action would
play in the campaign.
For decades the preeminent civil rights organization had been
the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). It was led byprofessionalsand intellectuals whose pole
starswere the Constitution's Fourteenthand Fifteenth amendments,
passed right after the CivilWar. They extended equalprotection
under the lawand voting rights but were routinely ignored in the
South.Through lobbying and lawsuits, the NAACP was trying to push
the federalgovernment to make good on these guarantees-a strategy
that had scored somesuccesses.President Harry Truman had
desegregated the armed forces, and theNAACP's able lawyers had won
a Supreme Court ruling (in the 1954 Brown v,Board of Education
case) that held segregated public education to be a violation ofthe
Fourteenth Amendment. For a time the NAACP's object, to trigger a
broadfederal assault on segregation, seemed within grasp.
But Brown engendered a backlash of "massive resistance" by white
south-erners, and although the effort to defend segregation often
was cloaked in therhetoric of protecting "states' rights" from
intrusive federal power, its maintargets were black people who
asserted their individual rights. Black parents whosigned petitions
in order to file school desegregation lawsuits in federal
courtSwere threatened with loss of their jobs or physical attacks.
State governmentsalso enacted a battery of measures designed to
harass the NAACP; in Alabamait was shut down altogether in 1957.
The organization lost hundreds of localbranches and about 50,000
members in the South during the late 1950s,
While NAACP lawyers went on waging courtroom battles against
"sepa-rate but equal" education, ordinary black people in southern
cities took upeconomic warfare against segregation in public
transportation. Black riderscould sit only in designated seats at
the back of city buses; if the seats werefilled they had to stand,
even if bench after bench of the seats designated for
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whites in the front were empty. For black passengers the system
wasdemeaning, yet it was also a vulnerable target, since the bus
lines depended ontheir fares. In three cities-Baton Rouge,
Louisiana; Montgomery, Alabama;and Tallahassee, Florida-entire
black communities boycotted the buses.They found leaders in black
ministers who communicated instructionsthrough their churches,
boosted morale at mass meetings, raised funds, andset up car pools
so that boycotters could get to and from work. In each city,the
boycott lasted until a settlement was reached.
Although not the first of the bus boycotts, the one in
Montgomety had beenthe most eventful. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
only twenty-six and had livedthere just two years when the boycott
began. It was not his idea, nor was heinstrumental in getting it
started-the key instigators were Rosa Parks, thesecretaty of the
Montgomety NAACP; E. D. Nixon, a labor organizer, and.ToAnn
Robinson, a teacher at Alabama State College. Nixon and Robinson
plottedthe boycott after Parks was arrested for sitting in the
white section of a bus, andthey enlisted people through leaflets
and other connections. But they realizedthat ministers could best
rally the black community. Because his abilities wereobvious and
because older, established ministers shied away from taking
charge,King inherited the leading role.
It did not take long for the young preacher to exhibit what
would later makehim a towering figure in the movement. King had the
courage to keep going inthe face of death threats and the bombing
of his home, and he was an ableorganizer and a rousing speaker who
filled his listeners with a sense of fightingnot just for a seat on
a bus but for a righteous cause. He was handsome,
articulate,educated, and Christian-all qualities that would make
him ideal to convey themeaning of black protest to white America in
the still-early years of television.As the boycott continued into
1956 and showed no signs ofletting up, journalistsfrom around the
countty and the world converged on Montgomety and madeits leader a
famous man.!!
Another of King's visitors was a black, bohemian, gay,
middle-aged ex-communist from Greenwich Village named Bayard
Rustin, who went down inFebruary 1956. An experienced organizer who
had worked for many years withlabor and civil rights groups, he had
endured beatings and jailings-and was afirm believer in nonviolent
action. For that reason, he rushed to Montgometywhen he heard about
the boycott and briefed King and his colleagues about howto build
and operate a nonviolent movement. When word of his
radicalassociations threatened to taint the boycotters, Rustin left
town, but not beforegetting Glenn Smiley of FOR to come and
continue the work he had started.
Like other Americans who gravitated to nonviolent methods, King
hadfound in the Christian gospels a strong religious injunction to
eschew violence,
but he also had studied the works of the theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr, whooffered a pragmatic rather than moral argument for
nonviolent action. MostAfrican Americans did not expect that
equality would be won by violentforce-if they tried that, severe
repression from local southern authorities waslikely, and the
federal government's intervention on their side would beunlikely.
What Rustin and Smiley did, besides providing useful tips
andtraining, was open the door to a broader world of thought about
conflict andalternatives to violence, the same door that was opened
to James Lawson duringhis years at Baldwin-Wallace. Thanks to this
and to his own experience in theboycott, King turned an inchoate
aversion to violence into an explicitcommitment to nonviolent
action as the guiding principle of the civil rightsmovement he
would soon dominate.12
For all the news it generated, the Montgomety boycott, like the
ones inBaton Rouge and Tallahassee, was not a clear victoty. The
boycotters in all threecities had started out not to end
segregation on buses but simply to modifY it sothat black people
did not have to stand when there were empty seats up front.City
officials in Baton Rouge managed to stop the boycott in a week by
agreeingto first-come, first-serve seating, with black riders
starting from the back of thebus and moving forward and white
riders doing the opposite. The Montgometyboycotters would have
accepted a similar deal, but white officials there held outfor more
than a year while the boycott continued. What finally ended it was
alawsuit, which resulted in the Supreme Court striking down the
statutes thatmandated segregation on the city's buses. The
Tallahassee action forced the localbus line to suspend service
altogether, but there too the boycott ended only afterthe Court's
ruling.
Although the bus boycotts proved that nonviolent action was a
force to bereckoned with, they failed to arouse a broader movement
across the South. Anumber of southern cities integrated their buses
to preempt boycotts and legalchallenges, and in recalcitrant
cities, including Atlanta, Memphis, and NewOrleans, small-scale
protests led to lawsuits that brought on court orders
todesegregate. The boycotts, moreover, did not work well where
blacks were asmall part of the population with little collective
purchasing power, or againstbusinesses that relied little on black
dollars. And since they needed near-universalparticipation to be
effective, boycotts were unsuited to places without
strongcommunity-wide organizations. Before a nonviolent movement
could pick upsteam in the South, a new sanction would have to be
found.!3
In 1957 Martin Luther King, Jr. and other young black ministers,
to rallylocal leaders and knit together black communities in the
South, founded theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
With King at the helm andnorthern strategists like Bayard Rustin
giving advice, the SCLC announced it
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would mount a nonviolent crusade for civil rights. Hesitant
about mobilizingpeople for bold action, it focused initially on a
voter registration drive, withlimited success. NAACP leaders,
meanwhile, remained wedded to legal action,though many of its
southern members were chafing under what seemed an elitistand
gradualist strategy.
If the civil rights movement was not surging at the end of the
1950s, it wasfar from moribund. SCLC ministers were building
organizations in cities suchas Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville,
and northern-based activists werehelping to provide nonviolent
training and to introduce a new tactic of directaction: sit-ins at
the segregated lunch counters of department stores. They weretried
in more than a dozen cities around the edges of the South, such as
Miami,Kansas City, St. Louis, Louisville, and Oklahoma City. One of
the peopletraveling around the region and initiating these actions
was the young ministerfrom Ohio, James Lawson.
When Jim Lawson had decided to go South in 1957, he leaned at
first towardAtlanta, the region's fastest-growing metropolis. But
Glenn Smiley persuadedhim to go to Nashville instead. The smaller,
less dynamic city in centralTennessee had a black elite that was
unusually progressive and open to whatthe Ohioan had to say. The
focal point was Kelly Miller Smith, a talentedyoung Baptist
minister and one of the founders of the SCLC and itsaffiliate, the
Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC). Nashvillealso had
a large pool of potential activists in the thousands of students
whoattended the city's four predominately black colleges, ranging
from theprestigious Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, to
the less renlo'l'rne:dTennessee Agricultural and Industrial
(A&I) College and the American BaptistTheological Seminary
(ABT).
The racial atmosphere was also less intimidating for black
people inNashville than in such Deep South states as Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi.The city's white establishment liked to
think of itself as civilized and forward-looking, and the city
called itself the Athens of the South. Black people were notshut
out of the local political system: The poll tax, a traditional
obstacle to blackvoting in the South, had been suspended several
times in city elections, and blackcandidates had even won seats on
Nashville's city council. The city's mayor, BenWest, was a moderate
on racial issues, and The Nashville Tennessean, one of the
city's leading newspapers, had a liberal editorial position on
race-it had pushedhard to end the poll tax and generously covered
the civil rights movement.
Yet for all its civility, Nashville was hardly less segregated
than the mostopenly bigoted cities of the South. Black people could
not eat in most restaurants.They had to use separate entrances off
back alleys to get into movie theaters, andthen they had to sit in
the balconies. They were excluded from public swimmingpools and
golf courses and had to use a separate waiting room in the train
station.Blackemployees of banks, department stores, and restaurants
worked as janitorsor dishwashers or in other jobs that kept them
out of sight.
When a federal court ordered the city to integrate its schools
in 1957, cityofficials devised a plan that became a model for other
southern cities-itintroduced meager change while still complying
with the letter of the courtruling. One grade would be integrated
each year, beginning with the firstgrade. Thanks to anonymous phone
threats ("We'll beat your little girl to deathand string her up by
her toes") and rock-throwing and stick-wielding crowds,most black
parents opted out of having their children take part that first
year:
19 black first graders (out of about 1,400 in the city) entered
previouslywhite schools. This was the kind of racial progress that
most white southernerscould live with.
W11en James Lawson arrived, Nashville had a virtual caste system
thatdeterrninledwhere people of different races could live, eat,
and play, what jobs
could hold, and how .they should act toward one another when
they metin a street or a store. But there were black leaders in
town who were itching tochallenge this, and there were white
leaders whose support for it was halfhearted.
Crow was still standing on its two hind legs in Nashville, but
Jim Lawsonabout to cut those legs out from under it.
moving to Tennessee, Lawson traveled to southern cities for FOR,
offeringand advice on nonviolent ways to combat segregation, and in
Nashville
held workshops on nonviolent action. In 1959 Lawson decided the
time hadto plan a civil rights action in that city, and he asked
Kelly Smith and otherministers to put out the word through their
churches that he needed
studellts to take part.14
The response was less than overwhelming. Local black campuses
were notbubbling over with enthusiasm for the civil rights
struggle; students were under
to conform and play by the rules, because young educated black
peoplefinallywere being promised the kinds of job opportunities
that earlier genera-tions could hardly imagine. The pressures were
perhaps strongest of all on
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students from poor families. Rebelling against segregation could
end upsquandering all the sacrifices their parents had made to send
them to college.IS
The students who showed up in the fall of 1959 for Lawson's
workshops atthe Clark Memorial United Methodist Church were people
who could not adaptto the status quo. Some of them, like Diane
Nash, were northerners whoabhorred the debasement of the southern
system. Others were young southernerswho, for one reason or
another, had decided they were not going to keep quietas their
parents had. Marion Barrywas a graduate student at Fiskwho had
almostbeen kicked out of LeMoyne College in Memphis for denouncing
a raciststatement by a college trustee. Two of the most committed
workshop-goers werefrom ABT, the city's poorest, least
distinguished school. Bernard Lafayette wasborn in the South and
then moved north with his family before going toNashville. He went
to the workshops at the urging of another ABT student,John Lewis, a
shy young man from a sharecropping family in Alabama's
cottoncountlY who had started going to the workshops the previous
year. They werejoined by a few idealistic white students, such as
Paul LaPrad.
Lawson taught the students about the historical and
philosophical under-pinnings of nonviolent action-about the
abolitionist movement, the Chicagosit-ins staged by the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1940s, theMontgomelY bus boycott, and
the movements led by Gandhi in South Africaand India. The two
central reference points were Gandhi and Christ. Lawsonwanted the
students to understand how satyagraha-"soul force," he called
it-could work to fight injustice: The downtrodden did not defeat
their oppressorsbut rather awakened in them a sense of common
humanity by showing themthe distress that their actions caused.
Nonviolent action was more than atechnique of social action for
Lawson; it was a means of tapping morefundamental sources of power.
16
His cool, clinical tone came as a surprise to his young
acolytes-he offeredhimself as a teacher, not a leader. A few,
including Lewis and Nash, were wonover quickly. Others had a hard
time accepting what Lawson was telling them."You've got to be able
to stand up and take your licks and fight back," theywould say. By
explaining how his methods were consistent with the religiousfaith
in which they had been raised, Lawson was able to wear down some of
theirdoublfs. Others stayed involved because Lawson was planning to
do something."I thought nonviolence would not work," Diane Nash
recalled, "but I stayed
h . I . "17with the workshops for one reason ... I' ey were the
on y game 111 town.From the start Lawson was eyeing a campaign to
end segregation in
downtown Nashville's shopping district. Most of the students,
like Lawsonhimself, were from out of town, so they had to pick a
target that would winthem backing from Nashville's black
community-otherwise it would be easy
for segregationists to isolate them and brand them as outside
troublemakers.Some women from the Reverend Smith's church went to a
workshop andexplained that what bothered them the most were
whites-only lunch countersin the downtown stores. Until the
suburban dispersal of big department storesand the flourishing of
fast food outlets in the 1970s, these downtown emporiaand their
diner-like lunch counters were standard features of most cities.
Inthe South, black church women could shop at these stores for
hours, but theycould not sit down at the counters to rest their
feet or use the stores' bathrooms.It was even worse when they had
restless, hungry children with them. If thestudents decided to make
an issue of the lunch counters, they could be prettysure these
women would be allies.18
As fall turned to winter, Lawson moved beyond theory and began
trainingthe students to prepare for what was to come. John Lewis
said they "stagedlittle sociodramas, taking turns playing
demonstrators and antagonists. Severalof us would sit in a row of
folding chairs, acting out a sit-in, while the othersplayed
waitresses or angry bystanders, calling us niggers, cursing in our
faces,pushing and shoving us to the floor. Always, Jim Lawson would
be there,hovering over the action, pushing, prodding, teaching,
cajoling." They learnedhow to defend themselves in case of attack:
how to curl up to protect theirvital organs and how to come to the
aid of fellow protestors so that beatingswere spread out over
several people, rather than being concentrated on onevictim. Lawson
taught them to keep eye contact with their assailants at
alltimes-experience showed that this could check an attacker's
rage. And theylearned how not to be provoked into striking
backl9
The students in Lawson's workshops were training for nonviolent
directaction, which was not yet a major part of the civil rights
movement. It wouldbe something far more confrontational than the
bus boycotts: Black peoplewho sat down at a whites-only lunch
counter and asked for service would bephysically violating the
South's legal and social order; they risked getting hurtand going
to jail. That was why Lawson had emphasized "the necessity of
fiercediscipline and training and strategizing and planning and
recruiting and doingthe kinds of things you do to have a movement.
That can't happenspontaneously. It has to be done systematically."
Anything lesswould dissolveunder the force that opposed them.20
To become familiar with the lunch counters and the store
employees, theymade scouting forays on two consecutive Saturdays.
Each time a group ofneatly dressed black and white students from
the workshops walked into thestores, bought something, took their
seats at the counter, and waited to beserved.When they were refused
service, as they knew they would be, they askedpolitely to speak to
the store manager and heard an explanation of the store's
-
policy. Then they left, returned to the church and talked over
what hadhappened with Lawson.21
Before the students left to go home for Christmas, the decision
was madeto begin the sit-ins in February 1960. When they got back
to Nashville inJanuary, they found that news of what they were
planning was circulating onlocal black campuses, and more people
were appearing at the workshops. So theymet twice aweek at the
Clark Church; by that time, they were calling themselvesthe
Nashville Student Movement. The most dedicated formed a
centralcommittee, reaching decisions by consensus and rotating
leadership positions tokeep from being overly reliant on anyone
person. They had become a tight-knitunit, bound together by the
intensity of the workshops and the belief instilledby Lawson that
they were going to make history. They were about to graduatefrom
what Bernard Lafayette, an ABT student, later called "a
nonviolentacademy, equivalent to West Point."22
On February 3 John Lewis picked up a copy of the Tennessean in
hisdormitory and read that two days earlier four freshmen from
North CarolinaA&T had sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter
in Greensboro andrefused to get up, even after being denied
service. The same day Lawson'sfriend Douglas Moore, a North
Carolina minister, called him to say that thesit-ins there were
growing each day. He was trying to organize similar protestsaround
his state, and he asked Lawson to help spread the word among
activistministers all around the South--and to act quickly in
Nashville to keep themomentum going.
That night hundreds of students crammed into an auditorium at
Fisk tohear Lawson announce that sit-ins would begin at Nashville's
department storeson Februaty 13 and that those who wanted to
participate should volunteer. Thenext week, as sit-ins spread
across North Carolina and into neighboring states,Lawson and the
workshop veterans held daily s~ssions teaching the new recruitswhat
they would have to do. "We were speeding up our schedule, yes, but
weremained determined to do this right," Lewis later remembered.
"We did notwant to unleash hundreds of eager, emotional college
students without properlypreparing them in the ways of restraint."
The trainers insisted over and overagain to the newcomers that
there must be no retaliation under any circum-stances. They must
dress well, talk quietly, and wait patiently for hours at
thecounters, and they must be willing to go to jail.23
The regulars at Lawson's workshops since the previous fall were
now thenucleus of a much larger group. As final plans were made,
they had to preparefor the chance that not everyone would remain
nonviolent. There were somewho balked at the risks involved:
athletes who did not want to lose theirscholarships, medical
students who knew an arrest record could wreck their
careers, or people who simply were afraid of getting beaten up
or thrbwn in jail.Only people who knew they could control their
impulse to strike back and wereprepared to suffer for the cause
would be sitting down at the lunch counters.24
Still, there would be plenty of work for everyone else to do.
The studentsdoing the actual sitting-in would have an entire
logistical system behind them.There would be drivers to take
participants from campuses to the First BaptistChurch, which would
be the staging area and control center. There would bepeople at the
church keeping track of who was where and what was
happeningdowntown, and there would be monitors and runners in the
downtown streets,relaying information back to the church and
instructions to the protestors in thestores. And there would be
people assigned to deal with the press.25
The students in Nashville were about to go public and demand
they betreated as equal citizens-just as workers in St. Petersburg
had done fifty-fiveyears earlier, in their march to the Winter
Palace. Both the Nashville studentsand the St. Petersburg workers
drew incentive from their religious faith, bothwere led by an
unconventional clergyman-and both renounced the use ofviolence as a
way to win social justice. But the similarities ended there.
TheRussian workers prepared in a state of feverish excitement,
convinced that theTsar would hear their pleas and make fundamental
changes-and they had noidea what lay in store for them. The
students in Nashville, no doubt, also feltexcitement, but they kept
their feelings in check and went about their businesscalmly and
methodically. They had been thoroughly briefed on nonviolentaction,
and they had a good idea of what to expect.
This contrast was partly a reflection of the differences between
Georgii Gaponand James Lawson. Gapon was impulsive, and he led
others by inflaming theirfeelings.Lawson, on the other hand, was
the most deliberate and cerebral of people,and he avoided whipping
up his students. He wanted them to think about whattheywere doing,
to assesswhat they confronted. But Lawson also had somethingthat
Wasnot available to Gapon: the knowledge of how nonviolent action
hadworked and been developed over decades, throughout the world-and
he appliedthat knowledge exhaustively.Although he was, no lessthan
Gapon, aman of faith,he approached the tasks of nonviolent conflict
like a man of science.26
Just three days before the sit-in was scheduled, there was a
large meeting in theReverend Smith's First Baptist Church. Smith
and other members of the NCLCtried to get the protest postponed,
until they could raise more money to pay bailin case the students
were arrested (less than $100 had been raised). But Lawson'stroops
would not hear of waiting any longer, especially now that students
in
-
Greensboro and other cities had acted. The moment of truth had
arrived,whatever the peril.
On Saturday, February 13, the students woke to a half foot of
fresh snow.They waited for their rides and were dropped off at the
First Baptist Church,the men in coats and ties, the women wearing
heels. When everyone hadassembled, more than a hundred in all, they
split up into groups of about twenty-five, each with at least one
member of the students' central committee. Thenthey started walking
two abreast past baffled onlookers toward downtownNashville. Mter
several blocks they reached Fifth Avenue, the ciry's mainshopping
street, and each group went into a store.
Lewis's group went into Woolworth's. Each person bought some
small item,to establish credentials as a paying customer, and then
headed upstairs to thesecond floor and took a seat at the lunch
counter. The waitresses looked stunned.When Lewis tried to order,
he was told that "niggers" were not served there. Acrowd of
shoppers gawked at them-as if, one person said, they were giant
spacegrasshoppers that had invaded the ciry. A few young white men
came up thestairs and shouted insults at them but left quicldy when
that drew no response.The students stayed put, even after other
customers left and a waitress hastilyscrawled a sign reading
"Counter closed." Mter the lights were doused and thewaitresses
themselves left, the students remained behind, reading and
doingschoolwork by natural light. Around six o'clock, a messenger
from the FirstBaptist Church came to say that it was time to leave.
They were elated whenthey got back to the church. "It was like New
Year's eve-whooping, cheering,hugging, laughing, singing. "27
Nashville's white establishment had no idea what was going on.
Such wastheir self-containment, most whites had failed to notice
the large public meetingsover the previous week or two and the stir
created by the Greensboro sit-in. Allover downtown, store employees
and managers were perplexed: They could notserve the students, as
that would break longtime custom and, in some cases,explicit store
policy. But the students would not leave, so all they could think
ofdoing was to shut the counters down and leave the young people
there.
There was no violence that day. But there was also no sign from
the storeowners that they were willing to reconsider and integrate
the lunch counters.Some of them, such as John Sloan, simply
believed that separation of the raceswas right and proper. Those
who were not attached to segregation weresensitive to pressure from
Sloan aswell as from James Stahlman, the influentialeditor of The
Nashville Banner, a staunchly segregationist newspaper. Theowners
also feared losing business from white customers if they let
blackcustomers eat at the counters. One sit-in, clearly, was not
enough todent inJim Crow.2S
African American college students in Nashville, Tennessee sit in
at a downtown lunch counter todefy racial segregation, February
1960.
Credit: Jimmy Ellis/The Tennessean
The next two sit-ins, on the following Thursday and the Saturday
after that,went much like the first, although there were more
protestors. Bands of surlywhites taunted the students but were kept
in check by the presence of police.The students encountered no
serious violence either time, but they could notget served at the
counters. The city's merchants still apparently had no idea howto
deal with the protests.
Saturday, Februaty 27, was the date for the next sit-in, A day
or two beforethat"the ciry's black leaders got word that different
conditions could be expectedthat day. Will Campbell, a liberal
white minister who was friendly with Lawsonand.Smith, told them he
had heard that James Stahlman and other
segregationistbUSinessmenhad been putting the screws to Mayor West.
When the studentstook their seats Saturday, the police would pull
out of the downtown and allowwhite thugs to go to work on the
protestors. Then the police would move backin and arrest students
still sitting-in.29
Nashville's segregationists finally had a strategy-physical
intimidation.The thought of going to prison, even more than the
prospect of getting beatenup, was terrifying to Nash, Lewis, and
many others. Growing up, they had heard
-
( /\f,~ ILL. ~r'".
~(~\~ KENTUCKYMOv ..1 _\ r - - *Nashville(-;
I) TENNESSEEr--'--\-'-
IMISS." I
I
chilling stories about what happened to black people in southern
jails and werelectured about the disgrace felt by their families.
Still, Lawson had made surethey understood from the outset that
what was coming would be dangerous.
Now those hazards were at hand.30
On Saturday morning, as volunteers congregated at the First
BaptistChurch, Lawson and the central committee members met in the
basement. Theyhad to find a way to show segregationists and city
officials that strong-arm tacticswould not deter them. For every
seat that opened up when a cop led away aprotestor, another body
would have to fill it. That would require goodcoordination and
communication, so that new waves of demonstrators wouldbe where
they were needed. Most of all, it would take numbers: The
leaderswould just have to hope that prospective volunteers were not
scared away by therumors of arrests and impending violence floating
around the campuses.
When the leaders went back upstairs, they discovered that more
than 300volunteers had materialized. It was now more important than
ever to make surethat the protestors, especially inexperienced
ones, kept their cool and avoided
any scuffles that would only justify repression. Lawson and
Lafayette had swipedsome mimeograph paper from ABT the previous
night and made copies of a listof "dos and don'ts" that were handed
out to the new recruits:
DO NOT:1. Strike back nor curse if abused.2. Laugh out.3. Hold
conversations with floor walker.4. Leave your seat until your
leader has given you permission to do s~.S. Block entrances to
stores nor the aisles inside.
DO:1. Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times.2. Sit
straight; always face the counter.3. Report all serious incidents
to your leader.4. Refer information seekers to your leader in a
polite manner.5. Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma
Gandhi and MartinLuther King.Love and nonviolence is the way.
The organizers made sure that anyone carrying a file or pocket
knife turned itin, and they weeded out a few people from the new
group; then they headeddowntown. 32
The students could tell things were going to be different even
as they walkedtoward Fifth Avenue. White teenagers, as they had
before, shouted insults, butthis time there was also pushing and
shoving, and the police did nothing to stopit. The real trouble
began once the students were sitting at the counters. Withthe
police nowhere to be seen, white toughs walked in and started
swearing atthe students, pulling them off the chairs, punching them
and kicking those whowent down. Lewis saw one of them stub out a
lit cigarette on one student's back.Others were spat on or had
mustard and ketchup poured over their heads andshirts. A television
camera captured a group of white men and women attackingPaul
LaPrad, as he lay on the ground of one store after being knocked
off hischair. No student fought back..?3
After a while the police arrived and began arresting the
students, not theirassailants. At that point, the plan worked out
early in the morning went intoeffect. Monitors kept track of where
the arrests were taking place and promptly
-
dispatched new squads of protestors to take the vacated seats.
Those taken intocustody filed out of the stores into the paddy
wagons through cheering crowds,their heads held high. The police
were baffled: These well-dressed, polite youngblack people-the kind
who should have put distance between themselves andanything that
might land them in jail-were actually courting arrest. The
copslooked at each other, Diane Nash remembered, as if to say: "Do
you see this.What will we do now?" After hauling away about eighty
students, the policeasked the managers to close the stores so no
more arrests would be necessary.For most of the students, being
arrested was not traumatic; they were buoyedup bywhat they had been
taught. The "kind of power we felt," Bernard Lafayetterecalled,
"was more forceful than all of their police force ... and all of
their dogsor billy clubs or jails.",4
"Big Saturday," as Lawson and the students started calling it,
was a pivotalmoment. The city fathers and police evidently hoped
that one afternoon ofturmoil would be enough to stop this nonsense,
after which they could all heavea sigh of relief and go back to
business as usual. White officials and businessleaders, of course,
had no clue about what had transpired in Lawson's workshopsfor
months and how thoroughly prepared the students would be. They
werestunned to find that the protestors were unfazed by beatings
and arrests, andthey realized they had only two options: They could
either step up the violenceand ride out the ensuing tumult, or they
could try to buy off the students withsome sort of concession.
Mayor West and a few business leaders chose the softer strategy.
Bail forstudents arrested that Saturday was reduced to just five
dollars-but they refusedto pay. So later that night they were
simply releasedwithout any bail at all.Whena judge issued a
fifty-dollar fine to each of the arrested students at their trial
acouple of days later, they again refused to pay and were slapped
with thirty-daysentences in the county workhouse. Two days later,
however, West ordered theirrelease. The protest telegrams coming in
from around the country-fromcelebrities like singer Harry Belafonte
and former First Lady EleanorRoosevelt-had helped him realize that
the students could hurt the city morebehind bars than they could in
downtown Nashville.'5
The mayor then played his ace. He announced that he would
appoint abiracial committee, including the presidents of both Fisk
and Tennessee A&I,to look into segregation at the lunch
counters and make a recommendation. Healso asked the students to
declare a moratorium on further sit-ins until thecommittee handed
down its report. The students accepted West's offer, eventhough
they were pretty sure it was nothing more than a stalling tactic.
Theyheld off from sitting-in for three straight Saturdays, starting
March 5, while thecommittee deliberated. But when they learned that
it would recommend
Rev. James Lawson being arrested on March 5,1960 during his
leadership of theNashville sit-in movement.
Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS
dividing the counters into two sections-one all-white, the other
integrated-they were back at the cOlinters the next Saturday.
In the meantime, arch-segregationist James Stahlman was pushing
in adifferent direction. Unlike West and some of the store owners,
he was devoted tosegregation as a bedrock principle of southern
life, and he was not interested intampering with it just to restore
calm in the business district. The reactionary editoralsohad little
understanding of the kind of adversary he faced-shown by the
factthat he armed himself and his staff for defense against violent
attacks by the youngstudents. The way to end the sit-ins, Stahlman
was convinced, was to go afterLawson, the "outside agitator" who
had stirred things up. Stahlman had influenceatVanderbilt, where
Lawson's assertivenesshad already rubbed some of the facultymembers
the wrong way. Under intense pressure, the university's divinity
schoolexpelledLawson on March 3; two days later he was
arrested.
While white leaders cast about for ways to thwart the sit-ins,
the nature of theproblem shifted. That, too, was a product of Big
Saturday. For generations, both
-
blacks and whites in Nashville had accepted whites-only lunch
counters alongwith the rest of segregation. But over the previous
decade, the ice around thesouthern system had begun to melt: The
NAACP's lawsuits, the bus boycotts,and desegregation court orders
had cast doubt on the future of Jim Crow. Thesit-ins, and the
beatings and arrests they provoked, sowed more doubt amongwhites
about whether the old order could be preserved safely. Black
leadersschooled in nonviolent strategy believed that the kind of
disturbing yet rivetingpublic spectacle unfolding in Nashville
would undermine segregation bychanging the way it was seen and
experienced by segregationists themselves.
Whatever change was occurring in the minds of white people was
not yetapparent, but the impact on black Nashville was huge. Thanks
to the coveragein the Tennessean and on local television, evelyone
in the city knew what hadhappened on February 27. Lawson's
students, once seen by their peers asquixoticoddballs, were now
treated like heroes on their campuses. Recruiting newvolunteers to
join the protests was now easier. The effect on black adults
wasjust as dramatic. The week after Big Saturday, the First Baptist
Church was'jammed with people who came to show support.
A call then went out for all black people in Nashville to
boycott thedowntown stores until the owners agreed to desegregate.
Ever since Montgom-ery the boycott had been a well-known weapon
against segregation. Soministers talked it up from the pulpit,
Nashville's black radio stationpublicized it, and women-the main
shoppers and, hence, the key players inthe boycott-relayed the news
around town over the phone lines. Massmeetings held by Smith and
the NCLC kept up the fervor. Monitors wereposted in downtown
streets so that any black person coming out of a storewould be
asked not to shop there again.'36
The boycon's impact on retailers (an industry whose profits
relied on salesvolume) was significant. As Nashville's white
residents had increasingly movedout to the suburbs, the stores had
become more dependent on patronage fromblack customers. To make
matters worse, many of those white customers whostill shopped
downtown had started to stay away because of the protests. "It wasa
ghost town down there," Bernard Lafayette recalled. Some days "the
onlypeople you saw ... were the demonstrators."37
In the sit-ins' first weeks, the store owners had shown little
interest innegotiating, even though not all of them were loyal
segregationists. GreenfieldPitts, an executive at Harvey's
departmentstore, treated the students respectfullyand let them know
early on that he was not personally opposed to desegregatingthe
counters. Close to one-third of his customers were black, and it
made nosense to him that they could shop in one part of the store
but not be served inanother. Yet he was not prepared to buck the
system. Once the boycott started
sapping their profits, however, the merchants began singing a
different tune.They now realized that this was no longer just a
"student affair" but a campaignby all of black Nashville. 38
The boycott's economic pressure on top of the public sensation
of the sit-ins had shaken u1p the status quo. The store owners
wanted out, but they didnot want to take the first step. In a
statement quoted in the Tennessean in earlyApril, one of them
explained that they wanted to avoid "the unenviable positionof
deciding on a social practice which would be a radical change in
the customsof our community ... it is most impractical for a small
group of stores to assumethe role of leading such a change." The
catalyst would have to come from
f h ' d' 39elsewhere.And when it came, it came from one 0 l' e
system s custo lans.Diane Nash was getting dressed in her dormitory
around 5:30 in the
morning on April 19, a Monday, when she heard a loud boom
outside. By thetime she reached the central committee meeting
scheduled for six 0'clock, sheand the other students had learned
that Z. AI~xander Looby's home had beenbombed. Looby was one of
black Nashville's most eminent figures, a lawyerand city
councilman. He had filed the lawsuit that led to Nashville's
schooldesegregation, and he had been an early supporter of the
studen~ protestorsand had defended them in court. As a proud,
politically outspoken AfricanAmerican, he was a natural target for
white supremacists. The blast waspowerful-it practically wrecked
the Loobys' home and shattered more thana hundred windows in a
nearby building-but it somehow failed to injure
. h h 40anyone 1ll l' e ouse.Nash and the other students were
horrified, but they also saw anopportu-
nity. The bombing was a serious escalation by Nashville's
racists, going farbeyond the punching and kicking at the lunch
counters. It was also aimed notat college students from out of town
but at a pillar of respectable black society.The students guessed
that black adults would go further now in confronting thecity's
establishment and that many white leaders would be shocked by
thebombing. It was time to turn up the heat: The students decided
they would holda march later that day.41
Immediately they scattered to let people know what had happened.
BernardLafayettewent to Tennessee A&I and commandeered the
public address system,announcing that a march to protest the
bombing would leave from the campusat noon that day. Then he went
around to buildings not reached by loudspeakers,interrupting
classroom lectures and exhorting students to join the march. Bynoon
there were over 1,000 people on the campus ready to go. As they
paradedin absolute silence down Jefferson Street, the main artelY
through blackNashville, students from Fisk and Meharry joined them,
as did many adults. Bythe time they reached their destination at
the courthouse, there were perhaps
-
African Americans and others protesting segregation-including
the student leaderDiane Nash (front row, center)-march to the
Nashville City Hall on
April 19, 1960, to confront the mayor.Credit: Ncw York
Times/Archive Photos
4,000. Nashville had never seen a civil rights demonstration on
anything likethis scale before; no southern city had, in
fact.42
While the marchers were standing and singing in the courthouse
square,Mayor West was up on the steps talking to a delegation
selected by the students.C. T. Vivian, a fieryyoung black minister
who had participated in the workshopsand sit-ins, excoriated the
mayor for not speaking out against the violence andsaid that his
police force had not upheld the law.West was offended, got into
aheated argument with Vivian, and told the protestors about all the
good things
he had done for black people. At that point, Diane Nash spoke
up. Rather thanattack West, she appealed to his sense of fairness
(which he liked to think of asone of his virtues), asking the mayor
if he felt "that it's wrong to discriminateagainst a person solely
on the basis of his race or color." West tried "to answerit frankly
and honestly," he said later; " ... I could not agree that it was
morallyright for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them
service." Then sheasked ifhe thought the lunch counters should be
desegregated. First he hemmedand hawed, but Nash was not going to
let him off the hook, and she asked again:'Then, Mayor, do you
recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?"West, finally,
sllid "Yes." The crowd erupted in applause, and West and
theprotestors hugged each other.43
This scene was played out in full view of everyone at the base
of the cityhall's steps. The Tennessean made sure the message got
through to the whole citythe next morning, when its front-page
headline blared, "INTEGRATE COUNTERS-MAYOR." The downtown merchants
now had the poli tical cover they needed todesegregate. Over the
next three weeks, representatives of the protestors-including Nash
and Smith-met several times with store owners and cityofficialsand
quietly worked out a plan to integrate the counters in the six
storesthat had been the main targets. May 10 was set as the date
when stores wouldbegin serving black customers. The student~' had
an outright victory in theirgrasp, but they also understood that
they had to shield merchants from the ireof the city's betrayed
segregationists. So they agreed that initially only smallnumbers of
black people would ask to be served and that the new policy
wouldnot be disclosed until it had been in effect for a week. That
way, integrationwould be a fait accompli by the time any backlash
came.44
James Lawson and his students had been targeting both the store
owners,who had the power to change things at the lunch counters,
and broader whiteopinion in Nashville that had created the climate
in which the stores operated.Lawson had insisted that a change of
heart among whites would come bystudents' sacrificing for the cause
and awakening the sense of justice that hebelieved was latent in
everyone. The sit-ins had been designed to disarm thesuperficial
imagery of blacks that racists cherished: The students were polite,
welldressed, and resolutely nonviolent-practically the picture,
apart from darkerskin color, of how Nashville's white establishment
liked to view its own sons anddaughters. The sight of them being
bullied and hauled away in paddy wagonshad been disquieting; the
bombing of Looby's house had been appalling. Thecumulative effect
of all this on white consciousness seemed to break surface onApril
19, when Ben West listened to Diane Nash on the courthouse steps
andagreed that it was time for change. Whatever West's motive, this
was the kindof transformative moment that Gandhian satyagraha was
supposed to produce.
-
But there was more to the victory than the exemplary effect of
nonviolentaction. If the sit-ins helped change influential white
people in Nashville, it wasnot solely by appealing to their sense
of decency. The sit-ins had been terriblefor business, they brought
disorder to downtown streets, and they forced themanagers to close
down. Moreover, enduring beatings and arrests demonstratedthe
students' courage and selflessnessin front of the very people-the
city's blackcommunity-whom their sacrifice would benefit. Civil
disobedience is not justfor the purpose of unbalancing opponents;
it also needs to galvanize potentialsupporters, just as Indian
protestors in the 1930s used satyagrahas to draw freshenergy from
their own people.
In the next several years in Nashville, there were sit-ins at
hamburger jointsand cafeterias, stand-ins at movie theaters, and
sleep-ins in hotel lobbies. Storeswere boycotted to protest racist
hiring practices. In all of this, there were morebeatings and more
arrests of unarmed protestors. The 1960 sit-ins had notexpunged the
city's racism all at once, but they did give black students
andactivists a sense of momentum and a model of action that they
applied in theirrelentless pursuit of equal rights. And while the
struggle to desegregate Nashvillewent on, the young men and women
trained by Lawson in 1960 were alreadylaying plans for nonviolent
action elsewhere in the South.
Diane Nash remembered feeling vulnerable at times during the
spring of 1960.Here she was just twenty-two, still a student, and
she was "coming up againstgovernors, judges, politicians,
businessmen." One thing that boosted hermorale was hearing radio
reports about other students staging sit-ins in citiesand towns all
over the South. A mass nonviolent campaign was now a realityin much
of the region.45
By the end of April there were sit-ins in seventy-eight cities,
and studentswere in the vanguard. About 70,000 of them participated
in some kind ofprotest during 1960, and well over 3,000 went to
jail. Local NAACP or SCLCactivists were often in the thick of the
action, but the students were unwillingto let the established
organizations call the shots. In April student leaders fromaround
the South gathered for a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina,
andthey created a group of their own-the Student Nonviolent
CoordinatingCommittee (SNCC). Lawson and the Nashville students
were in it from thestart, and Marion Barry (later to become mayor
of Washington, D.C.) waselected chairman.
The sit-ins caught on fast because they worked, at least in
places on thesouthern periphery, such as Tennessee, North Carolina,
and Texas. By
making audacious and highly visible demands for equal treatment,
studentactivists inspired broader protests from black communities.
By creating streetdisturbances and sometimes sparking consumer
boycotts, they put economicpressure on merchants. And by provoking
assaults from zealous segregation-ists, they upset the moral
complacency of at least part of the white population.As a result
business establishments in nearly 100 southern towns wereintegrated
by the end of 1961.46
In the Deep South, however, there were not many sit-ins, and
they met withless success. In Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana, most whitecommunities were determined to uphold
segregation, and not many newspapersin these states would, as the
Tennessean had done in Nashville, provide faircoverage. Retribution
also tended to be sharp and swift: Besides mass arrests, theKu Klux
Klan was given rein to threaten or beat up demonstrators,
andthousands of protesting students were thrown out of school. In
this menacingatmosphere, black adults were less eager to rally
round.47
Cities in the Deep South were also not asvulnerable to the
Nashville strategyof producing a local crisis and exploiting
divisions in the white community.Across the whole South, in fact,
the movement's momentum waned by thesecond half of 1960. So civil
rights activists were ready to try a new approach,one that modified
the earlier strategy in one crucial respect: Although
campaignscontinued for the most part to be locally based, the
activists were now intent ongenerating crises that reverberated
around the nation. The Nashville studentsdid not invent this
strategy, but they were t,heperfect candidates to execute it.48
In the spring of 1961, John Lewis spotted an announcement in the
SNCCbulletin soliciting volunteers for something called a Freedom
Ride. The ad wasplaced by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE),
a mo~tly white andnorthern though long-standing civil rights group,
which proposed to send anintegrated team of activists rolling
across the South on commercial bus lines,to have them test
compliance with a recent Supreme Court ruling that requiredthe
desegregation of interstate buses and terminals. On May 4 Lewis and
twelveother volunteers boarded two buses in Washington, D.C. Their
plan was toride through seven southern states and reach New
Orleans, their destination,on May 17.49
The Freedom Riders had little trouble in North Carolina and
Virginia,where sit-ins had already made inroads. But their first
stop in South Carolina,at Rock Hill, was a different story. Lewis
was attacked by two white men-slugged in the head and then kicked
when he was on the floor-as soon as hestepped into the "White"
waiting room at the bus station; two of the other riderswere also
roughed up. While Lewis went to Philadelphia for an interview,
theother riders continued into Georgia, and after they crossed over
into Alabama
-
on May 14, one bus's tires were slashed, and it was forced off
the road andfirebombed. Riders on the other bus were beaten and
clubbed at the Annistonbus station and, later, in Birmingham. The
white mobs responsible clearly actedwith the permission oflocal
police.50
The bloodied Freedom Riders decided they would cur short the
rides-theyhad established that the Court's ruling was not being
implemented-and flyfrom Birmingham to New Orleans. But the Rock
Hill incident had put the ridesin newspapers around the country,
photos of the burning bus outside Annistonhad made it onto front
pages, and journalists from around the country weredescending on
Birmingham, a city that had built a reputation as perhaps themost
vocally racist in the South. In addition, federal officials in the
DepartmentofJustice were becoming alarmed.51
The violence in Alabama put the Kennedy administration on the
horns ofa dilemma. Like other postwar presidents, John Kennedy
believed in civil rights,but he was reluctant to antagonize
southern politicians in the Congress, whochaired key committees and
could block his legislative agenda. Since the NewDeal, the
Democratic Party had been held together in part by a tacit
understand-ing that southern Democrats would support liberal
northerners at the top of thenational ticket, so long as the parry
looked the other way when it came to racerelations in the South.
This arrangement was already under strain, due to theBroUJn
decision and the conflict-ridden process of school desegregation.
But byfocusing national media attention on ruthlessness against
protestors and onbrutal characters like Birmingham's police chief,
Eugene "Bull" Connor, theFreedom Rides forced the White House to
choose between their higher idealsand white southern support.
52
For Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General, the main goal
after May14 was simply to help the beleaguered riders make it out
of Birmingham andend the rides without further incident. For that
reason, he and other officials atJustice were hugely relievedwhen
they managed to get the riders safelyon a planebound for New
Orleans on the evening of May 15. The situation looked readyto
simmer down, easing the pressure to act decisively. But they were
stunned tolearn a few hours later that a group of young people from
Nashville was planningto go down to Birmingham to pick up where the
original riders left off-andnothing they could say would dissuade
them.
On May 20 twenry students who had made it to Birmingham boarded
abus for Montgomery. Thanks to the mediation of Robert Kennedy's
aide, JohnSeigenthaler (a Tennessean editor before joining the
administration), the studentshad a state police escort until they
reached the Montgomery city limits. The citypolice were supposed to
take over then, but they were nowhere in sight. Insteadthe bus was
greeted by a flock of reporters and a pack of white supremacists,
who
assaulted the riders as they stepped off. Three students,
including Lewis again,were badly beaten in full view of the press.
Sowas Seigenthaler, who was knockedunconscious with a lead pipe
while trying to rescue two of the students. 53
Robert Kennedy could hardly tolerate the clubbing of his own
deputy by avicious gang acting with the acquiescence of local law
enforcement-but thecauldron of these events also surely fired his
sense of history. He sent federalmarshals into Montgomery to assure
that there was no further violence whilethe riders were in town,
and federal officials worked out a deal with Mississippiauthorities
to guarantee that there would be no repeat there of the
AlabaIT1aassaults. The state officials kept their word, and the
Nashville students, nowreinforced by more riders who had flown into
Montgomery, rode safely intoJackson. There they were arrested,
charged with violating state and local laws,and sentenced to sixty
days in jai1.54
The Freedom Riders served most of their sentence at Parchman
Farm, aplace that was infamous among black people as the most
hellish of prisons. Butthanks to media coverage, they not only had
reaped enormous publicity forthemselves and the movement, they also
had exposed to the nation the snarlingface of Jim Cr9w. At the end
of May, the Attorney General petitioned theInterstate Commerce
Commission to mandate the desegregation of all interstatebus
terminals, which it did in September. The Supreme Court's ruling
finallyhad teeth, and the integration of terminals was well under
way, even in the DeepSouth, by the end of 1961.
Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis (later elected to the
U.S.Congress), and their fellow students had changed the course
ofAmerican histolYby doing what James Lawson had taught them and
what they had learned in thesit-ins. To those who condoned
segregation, they demonstrated the cost to thecommunity's honor of
enforcing it, and they imposed tangible costs on all whoupheld it.
In Nashville this meant sitting doWn at lunch counters, in the
fullknowledge that they were likely to be beaten and jailed. In
Alabama the nextyear, it meant endangering their velYlives. The
demonstrative value of nonvio-lent acrion had never been so evident
in the thirty years since Gandhils campaignsagainst the British in
India. The Nashville students and Freedom Riders forcecl
on the nation, and out of the crisis they wrested swift if
unfinished changesin the system that withheld their rights.
When those who marched in Nashville on April 19, 1960, reached
the baseof the courthouse steps, a young white man named Guy
Carawan started
-
playing his guitar and singing. Carawan had met James Lawson and
several ofhis students at the Highlander Folk School, a training
center for labor andcivil rights organizers in the Tennessee
mountains. He was a collector of folksongs, and that day he chose
to sing one of the songs that John Lewis andBernard Lafayette had
learned at Highlander, "We Shall Overcome." It hadcome out of black
churches and been turned into a protest song by blackwomen strikers
in South Carolina some years earlier. Not too many others inthe
crowd that day knew it, but the lyrics were easy to pick up, and
they startedsinging along.
"We Shall Overcome" went on to become a universal anthem of
protest. Itwas sung at peaceful demonstrations in Cape Town,
Prague, and Jakarta-themost easilynoticed example of how Mrican
Americans, who studied and learnedfrom the campaigns of Indian
nationalists, themselves became examples forpeople using nonviolent
action to secure human rights and justice. But for thosewho watched
it from afar, the American civil rights movement yielded morethan
just a song. Thanks to its timing and location, the struggle to end
racialsegregation in the American South was the first popular
nonviolent movementto unfold before the modern mass media. The
media's presence created newstrategic possibilities in waging
nonviolent campaigns, especially the opportu-nity to involve third
parties who do not have a direct stake in a conflict but whohave
the means to tip the balance toward one side or the other.
Since the 1960s, as technology and commerce have expanded the
globalreach of electronic media and communications, activists for
rights and democ-racy have given careful attention to the images
their movements project todecision makers in Washington and other
key capitals, and to the people whokeep them in power.
Media-related tactics have the potential to be damaging ifthey
foster false hope that intervention by external players can
substitute forpatient internal organization or good strategic
choices in a conflict. But knowingthat the world is watching has
lifted the morale of many movements, and thecoverage has helped
channel material support from distant places to those onthe front
lines.
The American civil rights campaigners of the 1960s contributed
one otherthing to the power of nonviolent resistance in the final
third of the twentiethcentury. Because they were conscious that
nonviolent sanctions had beensuccessful earlier in history, and
because they were convinced that the use ofthese sanctions had
intrinsic advantages in resisting oppression, their
successconferred on nonviolent action a new aura of effectiveness
that it had neverbefore possessed. Not only did the mass media
popularize the story of what wasdone in the American South-they
universalized the impression that nonviolentforce could be more
powerful.
In the United States, that force transformed the social fabric
and politicaldirection of the nation. In Nashville and in other
southern communities, thesit-ins separated white leaders who had no
deep interest in preserving segregationfrom those who did; the most
ambivalent elements of the old order weredetached from the most
intransigent. The Freedom Rides played out on a largerstage-the
riders destabilized the balance of interests that kept the
Americansystemof apartheid in place, by provoking the national
government to act againstits institutions and practices. The
quickest way for civil rights activists to makeheadway in the Deep
South was to nationalize the struggle by igniting crises thatwould
draw federal intervention. "The key to everything," Martin Luthet
Kingdeclared in the early 1960s, "is federal commitment."55
What made this possiblewas, again, the growing role of
television in Americanlife:Commotion on the streets was experienced
vicariously by millions of people.Even if this did not guarantee
immediate action, it did reframe the public interest.The Freedom
Rides and the Birmingham demonstrations in the spring of 1963,(and
the march from Selma to Montgomery two years latet), created
unforgettableimagesof conflict between local authorities and
nonviolent protestors, transferringlegitimacy and popular sympathy
from one to the other-and changing thepolitical environment in
which national leaders had to operate.
The civil rights movement followed a simple logic: It mobilized
black peoplebehind nonviolent sanctions that compelled the nation
to change. Martin LutherKing's declara~ion on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial in 1963 that he had adream of racial equality
capped the largest nonviolent demonstration of thepostwar period in
America, the March on Washington. In the wake of PresidentKennedy's
assassination later that year, a white southerner, Lyndon
Johnson,moved into the White House and drove the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and theVoting Rights Act of 1965 into the annals of human
liberation-as Dr. Kingand his legions drove their spirit outward to
the world.
In 1936, when the Mrican American leader Howard Thurman visited
withGandhi in India, his wife, who had accompanied him, sang two
Negro spiritualsfor the great Indian sage. Dr. Thurman
theq,explained that "striking things" inhundreds of spirituals
reminded him of what Gandhi had told them and thatblackAmericans
needed to use his solutions to lift up their own people.
"Well,"Gandhi replied, "if it comes true, it may be through the
Ne!!jroes that theunadulterated message of non-violence will be
delivered to the world."56