Walking with the Wind

Locals called Nashville the “Athens of the South” (72), because it was one of the most educated and racially progressive cities in the American South. It was home to major colleges and universities (e.g., Fisk University, Belmont University, Vanderbilt University, and Meharry Medical College). Black people served on the police force, city council, and Board of Education. However, despite this progressiveness, in the late 1950s, racial segregation still prevailed in Nashville’s public schools, libraries, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and department store lunch counters. There was also still violence: An elementary school was bombed after officials announced a school desegregation plan.

Despite the violence and local, state, and federal authorities’ lack of interest in desegregating the South, Lewis felt certain in 1958 that, “this thing that was swelling around me, this movement, was not going to be stopped” (73). At one Sunday service, the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith invited James Lawson to speak.

Lawson, a proponent and teacher of nonviolent direct action, became Lewis’s mentor. From the fall of 1958, Lawson, then a divinity student at Vanderbilt University, began holding workshops for students in the basement of Clark Memorial United Methodist, a church near Fisk campus. Those Tuesday evening workshops became the focus of Lewis’s life. To him, the subject of nonviolence “spoke to everything that had been stirring in my soul for so long” (76). Lawson’s workshops attracted both Black and White students. Students engaged in role-playing exercises to prepare themselves for situations that they might encounter during nonviolent protests. Some students played angry White bystanders who beat the protestors while calling them racial slurs. Lawson taught students how to withstand these attacks and protect themselves without fighting back.

Lawson, Reverend Smith, and several of his Nashville student protégés, including John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and Diane Nash, began to test the segregation polices at department stores located in downtown Nashville. The students sat at Whites-only lunch counters, but left after being denied service—a prelude to sit-ins.

The first lunch-counter sit-in took place in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. On February 13, 1960, 12 days later, the Nashville student leaders held their first sit-in. 124 students met at the staging area, First Baptist, and then proceeded to Fifth Avenue, Nashville’s busiest shopping street. From here, the students branched off into groups heading to the various “five-and-dime stores,” (95) including Woolworth’s, McClellan’s, and Kress’s. Lewis’s group went to Woolworth’s store. They made purchases and then sat at the lunch counter, where the waitress refused to serve them. She closed the counter and the lights were shut-off in that section of the store. The students sat for several hours reading and doing their homework in the dark. They received some taunts from White men, but there was no violence.

This lack of violence lasted only a few days. Taunts escalated to pushing and shoving as the students made their way down Fifth Avenue to their targeted stores. White men started to target the Black citizens of Nashville at random. For example, a Black teenager who worked at one of the stores where the lunch counter sit-ins took place was badly beaten by a group of White men. The violence continued to escalate with White men beating students at the lunch counters, pouring mustard and ketchup on them, stubbing lit cigarettes on them, and trying to push them off their chairs. White students participating in the sit-ins often “attracted particularly brutal attention” (100). Despite the violence, the students all upheld their nonviolent practices.

Though the police arrested the sit-in participants, including Lewis, for “disorderly conduct” (100), waves of students kept replacing them, making it difficult for police to arrest all the protestors. While in jail, Lewis and his fellow activists refused to pay bail: “We were not about to cooperate in any way with a system that allowed the discrimination we were protesting” (102). Instead, the students sang. The city released the students after several hours. At their hearing the following day, Zephaniah Alexander Looby, an attorney and civil rights activist, defended the students. The judge refused to hear Looby’s argument and found all the students guilty. He gave the students two options: each could pay a $50 fine or serve thirty days in the county workhouse. Refusing to pay the fine, all the students chose jailtime.

Ben West, mayor of Nashville, ordered the students released the following day. He commissioned a biracial committee to study the issue of segregation in Nashville. The students agreed to halt the local sit-ins, but Nashville’s Black community boycotted all the downtown stores. Finally, the committee offered a proposal: Businesses in downtown Nashville would agree to a trial period during which they would serve Black customers separately in designated sections. Lewis and the other Nashville student activists rejected the proposal because it still involved segregation. The students resumed their sit-ins. Media coverage of these sit-ins helped show “firsthand the kind of anger and ugliness that the peaceful movements for civil rights was prompting in the South” (100).

In April 1960, the students founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). One day after this meeting, dynamite destroyed Looby’s house. While no one was hurt, this violent act spurred more Black Nashville residents to action. They marched to City Hall to protest the racial violence and the city’s lack of response to it. Mayor West finally conceded and on May 10, 1960, Nashville began desegregating its department stores.