Nashville was not just a site of civil rights protest; it was the place where the movement’s tactics, training, and organizational structure were developed and refined before spreading across the South. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Nashville movement “the best organized and most disciplined in the Southland.” That assessment came from someone who had seen every major campaign of the era, and he was right.
The Infrastructure of Nonviolence
What made Nashville different from other civil rights campaigns was the preparation. Before a single student sat at a lunch counter, Reverend James Lawson had been running weekly workshops on Gandhian nonviolent resistance at the Kelly Miller Smith’s First Baptist Church since 1959. Lawson had studied nonviolent strategy in India and was the most sophisticated theorist of nonviolence in the American movement at the time. Students from Fisk University, Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University), Meharry Medical College, and the American Baptist Theological Seminary attended. Among them: Diane Nash, John Lewis, Marion Barry, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and C.T. Vivian.
In the fall of 1959, before the Greensboro sit-ins made national news, Nashville students were already conducting “test sit-ins” downtown, gathering information and building capacity. They had rehearsed how to respond to verbal abuse, physical violence, and arrest. They had organized legal support. They knew what they were doing before they did it.
The Sit-Ins: February 13 to May 10, 1960
On February 13, 1960, twelve days after the Greensboro sit-ins began, 124 students from Nashville’s Black colleges walked into the downtown Woolworths, S.H. Kress, and McLellan stores and took seats at the lunch counters. Store owners closed the counters rather than serve them.
The campaign escalated over the following weeks. On February 27, white agitators attacked students at Woolworth’s, pulling women from stools, putting burning cigarettes to their backs and hair. Over the course of the campaign, more than 150 students were arrested for refusing to vacate the lunch counters when ordered to do so. All were charged with disorderly conduct. They refused to pay bail, electing to serve jail time as an extension of the protest. “We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to, and supporting, the injustice and immoral practices,” Diane Nash stated publicly.
The Black community organized an economic boycott of downtown merchants. The boycott was effective. Nashville’s Black residents controlled enough purchasing power that the merchants felt it immediately.
The Bombing and the March
On April 19, 1960, someone bombed the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the lead attorney representing the sit-in students. Looby and his wife survived. The next morning, more than 2,500 people marched in silence from Fisk University to City Hall, one of the largest demonstrations in Nashville’s history.
At City Hall, Diane Nash walked to the front of the crowd and confronted Mayor Ben West directly. Nash asked him whether he personally believed it was wrong to discriminate against a person solely based on their race. West, who had been trying to navigate the situation without fully committing to desegregation, answered honestly that he did not. The next day, the headline in the Nashville Tennessean read: “Mayor Says Integrate Counters.”
On May 10, 1960, six downtown stores opened their lunch counters to Black customers for the first time. Nashville became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating public facilities.
The People Who Came Out of Nashville
The Nashville movement trained the leadership of the national civil rights movement. Diane Nash went on to co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and organize the Freedom Rides. John Lewis became a founding member of SNCC, then chairman, then a congressman from Georgia who served until his death in 2020. James Lawson continued to advise civil rights campaigns nationally. Marion Barry became mayor of Washington D.C. James Bevel organized some of the movement’s most significant campaigns, including the Birmingham Children’s Crusade and the Selma voting rights marches.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded in April 1960, directly out of the Nashville sit-in movement and the network it created.
Jefferson Street and the Cost of Progress
Nashville’s civil rights history also includes a darker story about urban renewal. Jefferson Street had been the center of Nashville’s Black business and cultural life since the early 20th century: clubs, restaurants, the Jubilee Hall neighborhood, and the HBCU campuses that anchored the area. In the 1960s, the federal government built Interstate 40 directly through the Jefferson Street corridor, severing the neighborhood and destroying the commercial district that had sustained Black Nashville for generations. The highway construction was fought, but it happened anyway.
The sit-in movement succeeded in opening lunch counters. I-40 destroyed the neighborhood that had produced the people who organized the sit-ins. Both things are part of the same history.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Nashville sit-ins” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Library of Congress: “Sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee” (loc.gov)
- Global Nonviolent Action Database: “Nashville students sit-in for U.S. civil rights, 1960” (nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu)
- BlackPast.org: “Nashville Sit-Ins (1960)” (blackpast.org)
- City Cast Nashville: “Nashville’s Lunch Counter Sit-Ins and the Civil Rights Movement” (nashville.citycast.fm)
- SNCC Digital Gateway: “Nashville Student Movement” (snccdigital.org)
- Tennessee Historical Society: “Nashville Sit-Ins” (tennesseehistory.org)
- King Institute, Stanford: “Sit-ins” (kinginstitute.stanford.edu)