Lawson, James, Jr.
(1928–): Clergyman who
led the sit-in movement
in Nashville, helped
found SNCC, joined the
Freedom Ride, and con-
ducted workshops for
FOR and SCLC.
Lewis, John (1940–):
Participated in the Nash-
ville sit-ins, Freedom Ride,
and Selma march; SNCC
co-founder and chair-
man who spoke at the
March on Washington;
VEP director.
Nash, Diane(1938–): A
leader of the Nashville
student movement who
rescued the Freedom
Ride.
kids my age,’ Moses observed, ‘and I knew this had something to do with my
own life. It made me realize that for a long time I had been troubled by the
problem of being a Negro and at the same time being an American. This was
the answer’ [Doc. 5, p. 143].
When James Lawson Jr., a 31-year-old Vanderbilt University divinity
student, heard the news from Greensboro, he was well prepared to join the
sit-in movement against segregation. As a pacifist, Lawson went to jail rather
than fight in the Korean war and, upon his release, studied Gandhi’s nonvio-
lent formula in India. Back in Nashville, Tennessee – the ‘Athens of the South’- Lawson and fellow ministers Kelly Miller Smith and C.T. Vivian conducted
weekly nonviolent workshops that were sponsored by FOR and King’s SCLC
affiliate. For two years, seventy-five Nashville participants met in Smith’s
First Colored Baptist Church and role-played sit-ins to anticipate the verbal
and physical abuse that would surely come. The workshop participants
resented the daily humiliation of entering stores that would not let them eat
at lunch-counters, try on clothes, or let their children use the restrooms.
At the forefront of the local movement was a stellar group of young
people that included American Baptist seminarians James Bevel, Bernard
LaFayette, and John Lewis, Fisk students Diane Nashand Marion Barry,
and high school student Cordell Reagon. These Christian idealists became
prime movers in the national student movement. Nash, an articulate beauty
queen from Chicago, recalled her conversion to the movement: ‘I had a date,
and we went to the Tennessee State Fair....I started to use the ladies’ room,
and those were the first signs I had really seen in Nashville, and they were
“WHITE WOMEN” and “COLORED WOMEN”, and I just got furious.’ To
practice for full-fledged sit-ins, the Nashville students went to segregated
restaurants, spoke to the managers when service was refused, and then left
the premises. Always, Lawson graded their performance. ‘You have to do
more than just not hit back,’ he reminded the students. ‘You have to lovethat
person who’s hitting you.’
The Nashvillesit-ins were the largest of all, taking place in a city where
black customers spent $50 million annually in white businesses. A fortnight
after the Greensboro sit-ins, a hundred Nashville students entered the Kress,
Woolworth, and McClellan discount stores shortly before noon. After mak-
ing some purchases, they sat at lunch-counters waiting for service. A middle-
aged waitress at Woolworth’s froze at the sight. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said to her-
self. ‘Here’s the niggers.’ The white customers soon left. Then, the lights went
out, and the students sat in the dark for hours until the store closed. Once
safely outside, the students regaled each other with sit-in stories. Two black
girls told how they entered the ‘whites only’ ladies’ bathroom to the aston-
ishment of an elderly white woman. As the woman fled in tears, she shouted,
‘Oh! Nigras, Nigras everywhere!’
56 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Nashville Student Move-
ment: The largest, best-
organized group to
conduct nonviolent sit-
ins in 1960.