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

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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