Under Lawson's guidance, the students decided to challenge law and custom at some of those lunch counters. They would go in, take seats and request to be served. Anticipating that the response would not be favorable, even tending toward the hateful, they taught themselves to let racial epithets and verbal abuse roll off them like water off a duck's back. In the event they were physically attacked, they learned to collapse and curl up in a fetal position so as to protect their vitals. Most of all, they thought long and hard about what they were doing and why they were doing it. Slowly, their outrage turned to conviction, and their conviction turned to action.

The story of the Nashville sit-ins is splendidly told in The Children, a book by David Halberstam. Halberstam worked for The Nashville Tennessean and was principal reporter on the sit-ins. He wasn't much older than most of the people he covered.
The Children is a wonderful book for somebody like me, not only because it filled some gaps in that time when we didn't go downtown because of the troubles, but also because I have reached the age when I can get fretted by youth's impetuosity. Whereas kids proclaim the king is naked, get the fool some clothes, I've reached the age when one tends to recognize that while the king may be unclothed, there are surely extenuating circumstances surrounding the occasion of his nudity that need to be examined before he is dressed, thus avoiding the risk of upsetting organizational structures worthy of upholding.

In civil rights terms, that is the politics of gradualism. The idea that you shouldn't go too far too fast in terms of integration had some merit for a lot of people, both black and white, but it begs the question, how slow can you go? As Thurgood Marshall remarked, ninety-five years is about gradual enough.

While I doubt there was a black person in Davidson County who thought segregation was a good idea, a pretty good argument could be raised in favor of the devil they knew. Once the sit-ins progressed and the students started getting arrested and the white thugs showed up to beat the tar out of them, there was a pretty fair number of black Nashvillians who thought things might have gone too far. Here were these kids coming in from somewhere else, stirring things ups, enraging the police and white establishment, with whom blacks had uneasily co-existed for lo these many years, and then they'd go on their merry ways and they, the upstanding black citizens of Nashville would be left to pay.

Then too, they feared for the children and themselves. 1310 Southern blacks had been lynched since 1882 and the image of 15-year-old Emmett Till's mutilated body surely sprang to haunt them. What the students were doing was dangerous. They were breaking the law and even though it was a bad law, only the Lord could help them if whites saw fit to take their revenge.

Kelly Miller Smith was minister of the First Baptist Church. It was he who allowed Jim Lawson to hold his workshops in the church's basement and he who assuaged the anger and fear of his congregants. He referred to the students as the children, and he praised them for their courage, reminding the congregation, that "they were not alien blacks plunked down carelessly in this place, but the children of ordinary black people just like themselves and could easily be children of the congregation...and they were doing it for all the people of Nashville, all the people of the South" (Halberstam, p.177).

It helped that white officialdom was bearing down hard on the children, arresting them, jailing them, and allowing thugs to beat on them. How dare they treat these children like that? Black Nashville responded with an economic boycott. They refused to spend money downtown. White Nashville fearfully refused to even come downtown and so the boycott was compounded. By Easter, downtown merchants were beginning to see, if not the error of their ways, then the emptiness of their coffers.

A solution was sought. Committees were appointed, meetings were held, and speeches were made. Nothing much happened. Then the thugs firebombed the home of Nashville's most prominent black attorney. He and his wife were not harmed but more than 140 windows in the Meharry Medical College were broken (Halberstam, p.228). There was a spontaneous, silent march by black citizens of Nashville to the steps of City Hall where Mayor Ben West stood waiting.

©Copyright 2002 David Ray Skinner/SouthernReader. All rights reserved.