Complete Coverage: The civil rights movement in Nashville
The seeds of revolution were planted in a church fellowship hall, in dorm rooms and in a rented house along Jefferson Street.
They were nurtured in a pivotal emergency meeting at First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, with all who were there convinced that the very idea of America was up for grabs.
When the revolutionaries were ready, they attacked. But they didn’t fire guns, pull knives or throw punches.
They sat at lunch counters. They rode buses. They marched.
And they bled.
More than 50 years ago, a group of Nashville college students joined forces with local preachers to create a nonviolent army that went to war with the segregated South.
While similar groups did the same kind of work in other cities, the Nashville students had the first and most wide-ranging success in the decade when Jim Crow was routed. They stayed at it with such resolve that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on a visit to Fisk University in the midst of the students’ efforts, said he came not to inspire but to be inspired.
And later, when violence threatened to break them, the students defied the adults who advised them and kept going. They rode buses into police-sanctioned assaults in Alabama, knowing they might die - a decision made during that crucial First Baptist meeting, after one of them, John Lewis, posed two simple questions.
“If not us, then who?” he asked. “If not now, then when?”
The students would go on to play key roles in the civil rights movement’s biggest victories.
“The Nashville students dramatically expanded the notion of what a movement was on two or three occasions,” said historian Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “America in the King Years.”
The students were - and are - complicated human beings. Many would go on to achieve spectacular successes, while others met spectacular failure. But most would come to view the protests as the most important undertaking of their lives.
‘This is the cradle’
The students came together under the Rev. James Lawson, a graduate divinity student who moved to Nashville after King “literally begged him to move south,” Branch said.
In the fall of 1959, Lawson started holding workshops on nonviolent action. Students from Fisk and Tennessee State universities, Meharry Medical College and American Baptist Theological Seminary gathered at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church on 14th Avenue North.
“Clark was the birthplace of the civil rights movement in Nashville,” said Matthew Walker Jr., who participated in Lawson’s workshops and the sit-ins as a Fisk student. “This is the cradle.”
As Lawson stood or sat on one side of the fellowship hall and the students sat in rows of chairs, they talked about Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau. Or they would role-play a sit-in, with some students pretending to ignore those who stood behind them, yelling slurs and blowing smoke in their faces.
The goal was clear: to desegregate the lunch counters in downtown department stores and five-and-dimes, where black customers could shop but couldn’t buy a hamburger.
Lawson taught the students to react to violence by turning the other cheek and taking the blows. In a workshop captured on film, he urged them to imagine responding to their attackers in a “creatively loving fashion.”
“It wasn’t always easy, believe me,” said Walker, who lost his lower front teeth in a beating at the Greyhound bus station lunch counter but came back to join the Freedom Rides.
And yet the students were meticulous about their own conduct. Two student leaders from American Baptist, Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, passed out a list of rules: Don’t laugh out loud. Don’t block entrances to stores. Be friendly and courteous. Always face the counter.
They dressed like they were going to church. Often they went to jail.
The sit-ins begin
The Nashville sit-ins began on Feb. 13, 1960, nearly two weeks after four North Carolina A&T students spontaneously sat in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. Lawson didn’t think the Nashville movement was ready, but his young charges wouldn’t wait.
“They finally ran out from under him,” Branch said.
Emerging from First Baptist, they would wind their way past the old National Life Building, walk down Union Street and south on Fifth Avenue, home to three department stores: Kress, McLellan’s and Woolworth’s. They also sat in at nearby Cain-Sloan, Harveys, Grant’s, Walgreens and the Moon-McGrath drugstore.
On the first two weekends, waitresses refused to serve the students, so they sat at the counters and quietly did their homework.
On the third Saturday, Feb. 27, the police moved in. Some of the students were assaulted by white shoppers. More than 80 students were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, while police left the attackers alone.
That began a nearly two-month standoff between the mostly black protesters - who kept coming and coming - and the white business owners. The students were spat on, gassed with insecticide and had beverages and condiments dumped on them.
Black residents began to boycott the downtown stores, punishing white merchants during the Easter season.
The tension exploded on April 19, when a bomb tore through the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a leading black civil rights lawyer who lived near the Meharry campus. Looby and his family somehow escaped unharmed, but the students and preachers had seen enough. They sent Mayor Ben West a telegram and started walking.
Led by Fisk junior Diane Nash and minister C.T. Vivian, thousands marched, three by three, to City Hall. After West met them on the plaza, Vivian delivered a blistering indictment. Then Nash quietly lowered the boom.
After getting West to acknowledge the evils of discrimination, she pressed him.
“Then, mayor, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?”
“Yes,” West replied.
Three weeks later, black students and residents ate at the lunch counters, and Nashville became the first city in the South to desegregate. By then the sit-ins had spread across the South, and students in other cities realized that victory was possible.
Movement spreads
But the Nashville students didn’t stop there. They “stood in” outside movie theaters. They protested outside restaurants. And in the spring of 1961, they moved to the forefront of a national campaign.
The Freedom Rides, designed to require enforcement of a new federal rule desegregating interstate bus facilities, appeared to be over after riders had been savagely attacked in Rock Hill, S.C.; Anniston, Ala.; and Birmingham. Federal officials had gotten the battered riders to New Orleans when they learned that the students had other plans.
Back in Nashville, after a meeting at First Baptist, the students decided to keep the Freedom Rides alive. Though the adults who advised them said they would get themselves killed, the students said they couldn’t let violence separate them from freedom. Several of them were beaten badly in Montgomery on May 20.
That was the first of 13 Freedom Rides to originate in Nashville, according to Raymond Arsenault’s book about the rides. Operating out of a Jefferson Street house, Nash and Tennessee State graduate Leo Lillard cashed money orders and bought tickets for students on their way to Jackson, Miss. They intended to fill the jails.
Branch thinks the movement would have been set back by at least a year if the students hadn’t responded as they did. It’s a question the former students have contemplated themselves over the years.
Not long ago, Ernest “Rip” Patton, a former TSU student, discussed with Vivian, who lives in Atlanta, how remarkable it was that this group had all come together at one time.
“John Lewis from Troy, Ala., wanted to go to Troy State,” said Patton, who still lives in Nashville. “Bernard Lafayette from Tampa, Fla., wanted to go to school in Florida. James Bevel, I think he wanted to work in Mississippi and Alabama. C.T. Vivian, who lived in Peoria, Ill., he wanted to go into Chicago and work.
“C.T. and I, we agree that this movement was God sent,” Patton said, “because all of these people who had different agendas ended up in Nashville.”
With 50 years of perspective, it’s easy to conclude that the justice the students were pushing for was inevitable.
But there were no guarantees during those anxious days in the Deep South. And while there’s no way of knowing what would have happened if they had not taken the risks they did, one thing is certain:
It would have been a different world.
“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”
- John Lewis
Rev. Kelly Miller Smith
The Rev. Kelly Miller Smith walked at the front of Nashville’s civil rights movement for years, both leading the way and emboldening a younger generation of leaders.
The tall, eloquent pastor was a natural leader, a man other people were drawn to. He also helped a group of college students see that they could change their city and nation.
“We grew up overnight once we sat on those (lunch counter) stools,” said Bernard Lafayette, who studied the art of preaching under Smith at American Baptist Theological Seminary and sometimes babysat his children. “But we were able to sit on those stools with full confidence because we knew we had people like Kelly Miller Smith backing us up.
“He made us feel like mature adults who had responsibility.”
Smith, born in 1920, grew up in all–black Mound Bayou, Miss. He moved from Vicksburg, Miss., to Nashville in 1951, a few years after he met his wife, Alice.
The couple had four children. The oldest, Joy, held her father’s hand as she became one of 11 black students to integrate Nashville’s public schools in 1957.
In 1960, students from American Baptist and the city’s other black colleges started protesting segregation at the lunch counters of downtown department stores and five–and–dimes. Smith offered his church, First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, as the staging ground. Lafayette said Smith preached the “Social Gospel,” the idea that the Bible’s teachings are relevant to the issues of the day.
Smith left to lead a much larger church in Cleveland in 1963. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a close friend, spoke at his installation service. But Smith left after about six weeks to return to First Baptist Church Capitol Hill.
“He thought he just had not finished the work here in Nashville,” said his wife, Alice Smith Risby, who remarried about 10 years ago.
Smith, who also was assistant dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School for 16 years, died of cancer in 1984, a year after he was selected to give a prestigious series of lectures at Yale University. He was 63. Coretta Scott King came to his funeral.
Lafayette, who now teaches at Emory University, said Smith’s legacy was defined in moments like the spring of 1961, when the Nashville students kept the Freedom Rides going after violence threatened to stop their nonviolent movement.
“There’s a direct link between the success of the movement and the students who came out of Nashville,” he said. “Therefore there’s a direct link to Kelly Miller Smith and his leadership model.”
Zephaniah Alexander Looby
Originally published in The Tennessean on January 27, 2013, written by Nancy DeVille.
A pioneer in legal and political circles, a catalyst in the civil rights movement, he once saved Thurgood Marshall’s life
Zephaniah Alexander Looby was short in stature and came across as unassuming, but his willingness to fight for human rights at a time when black men were supposed to be deferential was legendary.
One of the most influential men in Nashville history, he spent a lifetime providing legal counsel to those who couldn’t afford it — most notably to a group of college students arrested for trying to end segregation.
Threatening telephone calls and hate mail were the norm for Looby, but it was the bombing of his North Nashville home that set off the black community. Looby and his wife, Grafta, barely escaped unharmed.
The bombing prompted thousands to march silently to city hall, where Fisk University student Diane Nash asked Mayor Ben West whether segregation was morally right. When he said no, Nashville became the first major Southern city to desegregate lunch counters.
“I think it just outraged us,” Nash said recently. “The fact that someone could be that subhuman and actually bomb someone’s home and risk murdering him.”
Looby, a native of Antigua, British West Indies, first came to Nashville in 1926. Before he was admitted to the bar here, he taught economic law at Fisk and at one time headed the Kent School of Law.
During the height of the city’s civil rights movement, Looby led a small fraternity of black lawyers who helped the arrested students. Earlier he had been the attorney for the black parents who filed the suit that desegregated city schools.
Looby was nationally known for his work as an NAACP civil rights attorney. He was one of three lawyers representing blacks charged with murder after race riots in Columbia, Tenn., in 1946, along with Maurice Weaver and Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice. The trio helped acquit 23 of the defendants.
In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, “Devil in the Grove,” Gilbert King writes that Columbia police officers followed the trio and arrested Marshall for drunken driving. As the police car proceeded down an unpaved road, Marshall feared a lynching.
But as the car came to a stop, headlights appeared behind them. Fearing a white mob, Marshall sneaked a look out the back window only to recognize a man with a limp. It was Looby.
Fearful for his friend and colleague, Looby followed the car carrying Marshall instead of driving back to Nashville. Reasoning that the mob would have to kill both of them, he refused to leave without Marshall, who was released unharmed.
In 1951, Looby and fellow attorney Robert Lillard became the first blacks elected to the city council since 1911. He served five consecutive terms.
Two weeks shy of his 73rd birthday, he died in March 1972.
Jim Bevel
Originally published in The Tennessean on January 27, 2013, written by Tony Gonzalez.
Incest charges stain legacy of firebrand
Jim Bevel emerged out of American Baptist Theological Seminary to become a formidable leader in the movement, but his twisted views on sex brought him down
One of the key figures to emerge from Nashville and become a leader in the national civil rights movement had a dark side.
Jim Bevel was convicted of having sexual relations with a daughter in 2008, one of his 16 children. Several of his other daughters maintain that he molested them, too, but the time frame for bringing charges had expired for them. One of them expressed disgust at his “pedophilia” in a New York Times obituary published after he died of pancreatic cancer in 2008.
But no story of the civil rights movement, and certainly of the movement’s emergence in Nashville, would be complete without recounting the crucial role Bevel played.
Along with U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette, he sprung out of tiny American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville to become one of the most original thinkers in the push for racial equality.
He helped lead the successful movement of college students to integrate lunch counters and movie theaters in Nashville, pushed to desegregate Birmingham, Ala., and grew into a trusted adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Yet he went to his grave leaving those who knew him to wrestle with a tortured legacy, and a lingering but ultimately unanswerable question — whether the enormous social change he helped bring about could ever offset or outweigh the repugnant acts he committed privately.
That disturbing contrast was on display in the sentencing phase of his incest trial. Friends, historians, professors, ministers and those who worked alongside him wrote to the judge to recount his successes and their horror at his behavior — almost in the same breath.
‘Against the grain’
Born in Itta Bena, Miss., one of 17 children, James L. Bevel grew up fast.
Before arriving at American Baptist in Nashville in 1957 at age 21, he’d already served in the Navy, worked in a steel mill and sung in a doo–wop band.
He soon became enthralled with the writings of Gandhi, which he found at the Nashville Public Library, and began attending workshops on nonviolent resistance.
Bevel was an intense leader who captivated audiences with confrontational ideas — going so far as to call people cowards if they made excuses for not taking part in demonstrations.
“Bevel always set the tone,” Lewis wrote in his autobiography.
His charisma won over another movement leader, Fisk University student Diane Nash, who balanced his fire with calm determination. They married but would later part ways after having two children together.
“He was a leader. And most often, (the students) followed him. But I think some of his ideas, some of them considered them off the wall,” said John Seigenthaler, chairman emeritus of The Tennessean. “His ideas went against the grain of convention. And, finally in Birmingham, he succeeded in bringing kids into the streets.”
The Prophet
After the success of the student movement in Nashville, Bevel became an adviser to King, who called on the young firebrand to bring his leadership to the struggle in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.
Bevel marshaled tens of thousands of protesters by taking the message of nonviolence into black churches and schools.
Eventually, King signed off on a key Bevel idea: using teens in the struggle. That decision took police by surprise. They unleashed dogs and fire hoses on the young people — images that flashed across the nation and forced the government to respond.
By that time, Bevel had acquired a new nickname — “the Prophet” — and he took to wearing a traditional yarmulke cap on his bald head. He wore it constantly while working on the black voting drive in Selma that preceded the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
He also agitated — unsuccessfully at the time — for a cross–country march of teens from Alabama to Washington, D.C., which some colleagues have said sparked the March on Washington. Bevel didn’t attend, in part because he was angry at how it evolved — a “damn picnic,” he called it in David Halberstam’s history of the Nashville movement, “The Children.”
Decades of anguish
Bevel’s downward spiral might have begun with the April 1968 assassination of King on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Bevel had been standing in the parking lot below.
The shooting sent Bevel over the edge, friends and family said. His lifestyle and preaching took on a darker tone, though his charisma still won him followers.
“A lot of us would crack if we were tested in our most vulnerable areas,” his son Douglass Bevel, 49, said in an interview with The Tennessean. “Your own pride can really work against you, and I wish he would have gotten help. He would have had a different outcome to his legacy.”
Decades later, sworn statements filed in court by Bevel’s relatives describe a twisted descent into “cult–like” sex acts and frequent molestations of children.
“We were wrong to let Jim slide on the issue of abusing young women,” wrote the mother of two of Bevel’s children. She said Bevel was not reported to police out of fear for the trauma on the young victims, the difficulty of proving what had happened, and because it might be “devastating to the movement as well.”
Things would change in 2004 after a series of family meetings. Bevel’s children — he had 16 with seven women — decided something had to be done.
A criminal investigation that began in 2005 led to a charge of incest against Bevel in 2007.
Defiant to the end
In court, one of Bevel’s daughters would testify that sexual abuse began when she was 6, eventually escalating in her teens, when she lived with her father in northern Virginia.
Bevel testified at length — rambling and defiant — and repeatedly explained a theory of sexuality in which he believed fathers should educate their daughters about sex. When the judge directly asked if Bevel accepted responsibility for committing acts of sexual abuse, he answered more simply: “No.”
A jury convicted him in April 2008, leading to a sentence of 15 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.
During his sentencing hearing, Bevel would listen to a prosecutor argue that the balance of his life was the opposite of what peers had described — that he really was a bad man who had done good things, rather than the other way around.
Looking back today, even Bevel’s son doesn’t talk about one side of his father without the other.
“The things that he accomplished in the movement, I think, that part of his legacy can’t be denied. He was pretty much a genius when it comes to strategy. He was also fearless,” Douglass Bevel said. “The sexual abuse stuff with my sisters, that’s where it gets really complicated. … People embrace the first part and run like hell from the second part.”
James Bevel would appeal his conviction to higher courts, a move contested by his daughter, who told a judge she feared her father’s life would not be portrayed accurately in history if his conviction were overturned.
The appeal, Bevel must have known, would be moot.
Two weeks before Bevel was sentenced, a doctor had given him just three months to live. He had terminal pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy. He had asked not to be resuscitated.
He died Dec. 19, 2008, at age 72.
Hank Thomas watched the assault upon Lewis with disbelief. He saw the mob gathered and poised to strike, and he watched John Lewis prepare to descend, and he saw the mob start to come at Lewis. Even as Lewis saw it approach, he had continued, absolutely without hesitation, to walk right into the surging mob. That was courage, Thomas remembered thinking, that was what it took to be a real leader in this struggle. John had gone forward without fear as if to accept his fate, the fate of being badly beaten and perhaps killed, the price to be paid for wanting his full rights. The good martyr, Thomas thought, and wondered if he had that same kind of courage.
- David Halberstam, “The Children,” 1998
Lewis describes the behind-the-scenes drama before he, as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spoke at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963:
What none of the crowd saw - nor did any of the network television cameras mounted on platforms to beam the event live to a worldwide audience, thanks to the newly orbiting communications satellite Telstar - was what was happening back behind Lincoln’s statue, where an emergency gathering of march leaders had been called in a security guard’s small office. The subject of this small summit was my speech.
By now, word had come that alarms were sounding in all quarters. Walter Reuther was irate that I had dared to criticize the President’s civil rights bill. Bobby Kennedy had talked to (Archbishop Patrick) O’Boyle that morning and had then spoken with Burke Marshall about my speech. He, too, was upset.
(NAACP leader) Roy Wilkins was having a fit, saying he just didn’t understand us SNCC people, that we always wanted to be different. He got up in my face a bit, saying we were “double-crossing” the people who had gathered to support this bill. But I didn’t back down. I told him I had prepared this speech, and we had a right to say what we wanted to say.
“Mr. Wilkins,” I told him, “you don’t understand. I’m not just speaking for myself. I’m speaking for my colleagues in SNCC, and for the people in the Delta and in the Black Belt. You haven’t been there, Mr. Wilkins. You don’t understand.” He started shaking his finger at me, and I shook mine right back at him. For a moment, it was getting to be a real scene. ... As the time drew near for me to take the stage, there was still a battle going on over my address. (A. Philip) Randolph had returned to the room. (Bayard) Rustin was there. A long list of objections and concerns had been scribbled. But now I wasn’t the only one they were dealing with. Courtland Cox and James Forman had gotten wind of what was happening and had made their way back to the tiny office. They were hot.
If one word of this speech was changed, they told Bayard, it would be over their dead bodies.
It looked as if no one was going to budge. Then Randolph stepped in. He looked beaten down and very tired.
“I have waited twenty-two years for this,” he told us. “I’ve waited all my life for this opportunity. Please don’t ruin it.” Then he turned to me. “John,” he said. He looked as if he might cry. “We’ve come this far together. Let us stay together.” This was as close to a plea as a man as dignified as he could come. How could I say no? It would be like saying no to Mother Teresa.
I said I would fix it. And so Forman sat down at a portable Underwood typewriter in that little room, and I stood beside him as we talked through every sentence, every phrase.
- “Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” 1998
Originally published in The Tennessean on January 27, 2013, written by Scott Stroud, photo illustrations by Larry McCormack.
Fifty years ago this week, thousands of Americans traveled to Washington, D.C., to march for jobs and equality, and to listen as their leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., put definition to a movement that had been decades in the making.
The seeds had been sown in the streets of Nashville, where a group of determined students from this city’s colleges and universities made their stand. The students said no to segregated lunch counters, no to segregated movie theaters and no to a culture of inequality.
The challenge those students issued might be the biggest thing that has ever happened in this city. Certainly it ranks among the most dramatic.
Time passes. A city changes. Many of the lunch counters, bus stations and hotel lobbies are either gone or no longer recognizable.
With little done to commemorate these events, it’s easy to forget that the demonstrations and sit–ins took place in and around downtown: on Fifth Avenue, where Kress, McLellan’s and Woolworth’s no longer exist; at Cain–Sloan, Harveys, Grant’s and the Moon–McGrath drugstore; in the old First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, since demolished and moved, the original site replaced by a parking lot.
Tennessean photographer Larry McCormack went to those places to produce photographs that combine archival photographs of these events with recent images. His work reminds us that what happened unfolded right here. On these streets.
Many of the students and their leaders have died. Others are elderly, their memories fading. But the images here, ghosts from a city’s past, remind us of the work they did.
Related links:
John Lewis: Nashville prepared me
Bernard Lafayette: Fulfilling King's last request
Diane Nash: She refused to give her power away
Will Campbell" A 'bootleg preacher' who tried to love them all
Jim Zwerg: The accidental advocate
Catherine Burks-Brooks: She would not be moved