was morally wrong. The mayor’s concession marked the turning point in
Nashville. Three weeks later, the Greyhound bus terminal served blacks food
on the same basis as whites, making Nashville the first major southern city
to begin desegregating its lunch-counters. Lawson’s highly trained demon-
strators worked miracles.
As always, there was a price to be paid for racial progress. The four
blacks who ate the first meal at an integrated counter were badly beaten,
and bombs were discovered in the terminal. James Lawson was expelled
from Vanderbilt, prompting the divinity school dean to resign in protest. It
would take four more years of sit-ins, marches, beatings, and arrests before
blacks in Nashville could desegregate hotels, movie theaters, and fast-food
restaurants.
In Atlanta, which civic boosters called the ‘City Too Busy to Hate,’
Morehouse College football star Lonnie King was concerned that Greensboro
‘would again be another isolated incident in black history if others didn’t join
in to make it become something.’ He wondered, ‘Why don’t wemake it hap-
pen here?’ He recruited Julian Bond, a published poet and the handsome
son of an eminent scholar, to be the voice of the students. At exactly 11.00
a.m., on 15 March, two hundred protesters occupied the dining areas of city
hall, the state capitol building, the county courthouse, two office buildings,
and the bus and train stations. When an official said they could not be
served, Bond replied, ‘The sign outside says the public is welcome and we’re
the public and we want to eat.’ The demonstrators then refused the lieute-
nant governor’s plea to leave, prompting the police to put them in jail,
where lunch was served. Once released, the students organized as the Com-
mittee on Appeal for Human Rights and called on merchants and institutions
to desegregate. Spelman student Ruby Doris Smith took on Grady hospital
because it admitted blacks as patients but compelled them to enter the build-
ing through separate doors. When the receptionist insisted Smith leave
because she was not sick, Smith vomited all over the receptionist’s desk. ‘Is
that sick enough for you?’ Smith demanded to know.
By the end of 1960, sit-ins had occurred in all southern states but
Mississippi. All told, a citizen army of 70,000 crossed the color line in
150 cities to desegregate many different public venues. They not only sat at
segregated lunch-counters, they waded in segregated pools, knelt in segre-
gated churches, lay on segregated beaches, read in segregated libraries, rode
segregated buses, bowled in segregated bowling alleys, skated on segregated
ice rinks, slept in segregated motel lobbies, sat in segregated theaters, walked
into segregated parks and museums, washed clothes in segregated laundro-
mats, and applied for ‘whites-only’ jobs. Greensboro’s Joseph McNeil explained
why sit-ins broke out in so many places: ‘I guess everybody was pretty well
fed up at the same time.’58 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Bond, Julian (1940–):
SNCC co-founder and
communications director.