The Nashville sit-ins were a 87-day campaign of nonviolent direct action that desegregated downtown Nashville lunch counters and established the tactical blueprint for student civil rights organizing across the South. They ran from February 13 to May 10, 1960. When they ended, Nashville became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating public facilities. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Nashville movement “the best organized and most disciplined in the Southland.”
What They Were Protesting
Under Nashville’s Jim Crow system, Black residents could shop in downtown department stores but were barred from sitting at the lunch counters inside those same stores. It was a deliberate humiliation built into the daily routines of commerce: welcome to spend money, not welcome to eat. African Americans were similarly excluded from most restaurants, theaters, hotels, and public waiting rooms across the city.
The Preparation
What made Nashville different from most civil rights campaigns was not the protest itself but the years of preparation that preceded it. Beginning in 1958, Reverend James Lawson, a Vanderbilt Divinity School student who had studied Gandhian nonviolence while working as a missionary in India, began running weekly workshops on nonviolent direct action at First Baptist Church on Capitol Hill under Reverend Kelly Miller Smith.
Students from Nashville’s four historically Black colleges, Fisk University, Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University), Meharry Medical College, and American Baptist Theological Seminary, attended. The student leaders who emerged from those workshops included Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Bernard Lafayette, and C.T. Vivian.
In the fall of 1959, months before the Greensboro sit-ins made national headlines, Nashville students were already conducting test sit-ins, sending integrated teams into downtown stores to assess reactions and gather intelligence. The movement was organized before it was publicly visible.
February 13, 1960: The First Sit-In
On February 13, 1960, twelve days after four students in Greensboro, North Carolina made national news by sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, 124 Nashville students walked into three downtown stores: Woolworths, S.H. Kress, and McLellan. After making purchases elsewhere in each store, they sat at the lunch counters. The owners closed the counters and refused service. The students sat in silence until the stores closed.
The campaign expanded over the following weeks to include Walgreens, Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals, Grant’s variety store, and the major department stores Cain-Sloan and Harvey.
“Big Saturday”: February 27
On February 27, white agitators attacked the students at Woolworth’s. John Lewis later described the scene: a group of young white men came in and began physically attacking the women at the counter, pulling cigarettes against their backs and hair. Police arrived and arrested 81 protesters. Not a single white attacker was charged.
The arrested students refused to pay the $50 fines and chose to serve 33 days in the county workhouse. Diane Nash issued a public statement: “We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants.” The decision to refuse bail, later called “jail-no-bail,” became a tactic adopted by civil rights campaigns across the South.
The same week, Vanderbilt University expelled James Lawson from its Divinity School for his involvement in the sit-ins. The expulsion was widely covered and generated national attention for the Nashville campaign.
Nashville’s Black community organized an economic boycott of downtown merchants. The boycott was effective: merchants were losing money.
The Bombing and the March
On April 19, 1960, someone bombed the home of Z. Alexander Looby, the lead attorney defending the sit-in students. Looby and his wife survived. The explosion was powerful enough to shatter windows at Meharry Medical College a block away.
The following morning, more than 2,500 people marched in silence from Fisk University to City Hall. At City Hall, Diane Nash walked to the front and confronted Mayor Ben West directly. Nash was 22 years old. She asked him whether he personally believed it was wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of race.
West, who had been trying to mediate the situation without fully committing, said he believed it was wrong. The Nashville Tennessean ran the headline the next day: “Mayor Says Integrate Counters.”
May 10, 1960
Within three weeks of West’s statement, six downtown stores opened their lunch counters to Black customers. Nashville became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating public facilities. The sit-in campaign was over.
The campaign had lasted 87 days, involved over 150 arrests, survived a bombing, and prevailed through economic pressure and the disciplined refusal to retaliate against physical violence.
What Came After
The Nashville sit-ins produced the leadership infrastructure of the national civil rights movement. In April 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded at a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, built directly from the networks the Nashville movement had created. Diane Nash co-founded SNCC. John Lewis became its chairman. When CORE suspended the Freedom Rides in 1961 after violent attacks in Alabama, Nash took over coordination and kept them running.
The Nashville sit-ins spread their tactics to 69 cities across the United States. The training model, the organizational discipline, and the “jail-no-bail” strategy were all developed on the lunch counter stools in downtown Nashville between February and May 1960.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Nashville sit-ins” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: “Diane Nash” (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)
- SNCC Digital Gateway: “Nashville Student Movement” and “Diane Nash” (snccdigital.org)
- Tennessee State University: “Nashville Sit-Ins” (ww2.tnstate.edu)
- King Institute, Stanford: “Nash, Diane Judith” (kinginstitute.stanford.edu)
- City Cast Nashville: “Nashville’s Lunch Counter Sit-Ins” (nashville.citycast.fm)