Every Tuesday evening in the fall of 1959, a group of college students filed into Clark Memorial United Methodist Church on the north side of Nashville for workshops on how to be beaten without fighting back.
The instructor was James Lawson, a thirty-one-year-old Methodist minister and Vanderbilt Divinity student who had spent three years in India studying Gandhian nonviolence. Martin Luther King Jr. had personally recruited him to bring those methods south. The students came from Nashville’s four Black colleges — Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, Tennessee A&I, and Meharry Medical College. They were young. Most were between eighteen and twenty-three. They included a former sharecropper’s son from Troy, Alabama, named John Lewis; a Chicago transplant at Fisk named Diane Nash; a theology student named James Bevel; a future mayor of Washington, D.C., named Marion Barry; and a minister named C.T. Vivian.
Lawson’s workshops were not lectures. They were rehearsals. Students took turns sitting at an imaginary lunch counter while their classmates played the roles of white hecklers — shouting slurs, shoving them off stools, grinding lit cigarettes into their skin, pouring ketchup in their hair. The rules were absolute: do not strike back, do not curse, do not even raise your hands to protect your face. Sit straight and look forward. Be polite at all times. If knocked to the floor, curl into a ball. If arrested, go limp. The students practiced this for months before anyone sat down at a real counter.
The woman who would come to lead the movement had never seen a “Whites Only” sign before she arrived in Nashville.
Diane Nash grew up middle-class and Catholic on the South Side of Chicago. She transferred to Fisk in 1959 and walked into a world she hadn’t known existed. The Tennessee State Fair was her first encounter with Jim Crow — separate entrances, separate water fountains, signs that sorted human beings by color. She watched Black workers buy food at lunch counters and then carry it outside to eat on the curb, because they were not permitted to sit down in the establishments that took their money.
She described the feeling later as suffocation. Every time she obeyed a segregation sign, she said, she felt like she was “agreeing that I was too inferior” to use the same facilities as everyone else. She went looking for someone who was doing something about it. She found Lawson’s workshops.
Nash was not the loudest voice in the room. She was the most precise. She asked hard questions, thought strategically, and had a quality that would become her most dangerous weapon at the courthouse steps: she could ask a question so direct that the only honest answer was the one you didn’t want to give.
On February 13, 1960 — two weeks after four students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a Woolworth’s counter and refused to leave — 124 Nashville students walked into Woolworth’s, Kress, and McClellan’s on Fifth Avenue and took seats at the whites-only lunch counters. They were dressed in their best clothes. They carried textbooks. They ordered coffee and were refused. They sat there anyway.
For two weeks, nothing much happened except silence. The stores closed the counters rather than serve them. The students came back the next day.
On February 27 — a Saturday the students would later call “Big Saturday” — the violence started. White teenagers and older men descended on the stores. Students were pulled from their stools and beaten. One was shoved down a flight of stairs at McClellan’s. Lit cigarettes were ground out on the backs of their necks. Ketchup and mustard were squeezed into their hair. The students did not fight back. They sat straight and looked forward, exactly as Lawson had taught them.
The police stood and watched. When they finally intervened, they arrested the students — eighty-one of them, including John Lewis — on charges of disorderly conduct. None of the attackers were detained.
The arrests backfired. The students who were hauled away were replaced within minutes by a second wave, and then a third. Lawson’s workshops had trained far more people than anyone realized. And the spectacle of well-dressed college students being dragged out of department stores for the crime of ordering coffee while police let their attackers walk free played exactly the way it looks when you write it down.
The movement opened a second front: money.
Under the banner “Don’t Buy Downtown” and “No Fashions for Easter,” Nashville’s Black community launched an economic boycott of the stores that refused to serve them. The timing was surgical — Easter 1960 fell on April 17, and Easter was the second-biggest shopping season of the year. Black families who traditionally bought new Sunday clothes chose to wear last year’s outfits or shop elsewhere. The phone trees ran through every church in North Nashville.
Downtown emptied. Merchants reported a twenty to twenty-five percent drop in revenue. White shoppers stayed home too, put off by the tension. Someone remarked that you could roll a bowling ball down Church Street and not hit anyone. The stores that had refused to serve Black customers at a lunch counter were now watching Black customers refuse to set foot in the building at all. The math was simple and devastating.
Meanwhile, Vanderbilt expelled James Lawson from the Divinity School for his role in organizing the sit-ins. The Nashville Banner had called him an outside agitator. The Vanderbilt chancellor said civil disobedience was incompatible with being a student. In response, the dean of the Divinity School resigned. Ten of eleven faculty members followed him out the door. It was the largest faculty revolt in the university’s history, and it made national news. Vanderbilt, trying to punish the movement, had handed it a megaphone.
Then someone tried to kill the lawyer.
At 5:30 on the morning of April 19, 1960, a bundle of dynamite was thrown from a car at the home of Z. Alexander Looby at 2012 Meharry Boulevard. Looby was a city councilman — one of the first Black men elected to public office in Nashville — and he had been defending the arrested students in court. The blast destroyed the front of the house and blew out 147 windows at Meharry Medical College across the street. Looby and his wife, Grafta, were asleep in the back bedroom. They survived.
The bombing was meant to terrorize. Instead, it mobilized.
Within hours, more than three thousand people gathered in North Nashville. They formed a line, three abreast, and began walking south — past the homes, past the churches, past Tennessee A&I, past the state capitol on the hill. They did not chant. They did not sing. They walked in absolute silence. The only sound was their footsteps. Three thousand people walking without a word through the streets of Nashville toward the courthouse on Public Square.
It is one of the earliest mass marches of the civil rights movement, and every account of it mentions the silence first.
On the steps of the courthouse, C.T. Vivian read a prepared statement. He accused the city of turning a blind eye to violence. He called the bombing what it was — domestic terrorism tolerated by a power structure that preferred order over justice.
Then Diane Nash stepped forward.
She was twenty-two years old. She had been in Nashville for less than a year. She looked at Mayor Ben West and asked him a question:
“Mayor West, do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?”
It was the kind of question that only works if you ask it plainly, in front of three thousand witnesses, to a man who knows the honest answer will cost him. A politician’s instinct is to hedge — to talk about process, committees, the complexity of the situation. Nash didn’t give him room for that. She asked a moral question and waited for a moral answer.
West paused. Then he said yes. He believed it was wrong.
Nash pressed: “Then, Mayor, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?”
West said yes again.
It was the first time a major Southern elected official had publicly admitted that segregation was morally wrong. The Nashville Banner — the same paper that had called Lawson an outside agitator — ran the headline across the front page. The next day, Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Nashville. He spoke at Fisk and told the crowd he had not come to bring inspiration but “to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.” He called the Nashville movement “the best organized and the most disciplined in the Southland today.”
Three weeks later, on May 10, 1960, six downtown Nashville lunch counters — Woolworth’s, Kress, McClellan’s, and three others — served Black customers for the first time. Nashville became the first major city in the South to begin desegregating its public accommodations. Not because a court ordered it. Not because the federal government intervened. Because a twenty-two-year-old woman asked a question that couldn’t be answered honestly without conceding the whole argument, and a mayor — to his credit — answered it honestly.
The people who trained in that church on Tuesday nights went on to reshape the country. John Lewis became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and then a United States congressman who served for thirty-three years. Diane Nash helped organize the Freedom Rides when the original riders were beaten in Alabama and SNCC abandoned the effort — she insisted they continue, and they did. James Bevel became one of King’s closest strategists, helping design the Birmingham children’s campaign and the Selma to Montgomery marches. C.T. Vivian carried the Nashville model of disciplined nonviolence into every major campaign of the 1960s. Marion Barry took what he’d learned at Lawson’s workshops to Washington.
James Lawson — expelled from Vanderbilt, called an outside agitator, arrested multiple times — returned to the university decades later as a Distinguished Professor. In 2022, Vanderbilt established the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements. The school that threw him out built an institute in his name.
In 2021, the Nashville Metro Council named the landing in front of the Davidson County Courthouse — the exact spot where Nash confronted West — Diane Nash Plaza.
The sit-in movement started in Greensboro. But it was perfected in Nashville, in a church on Tuesday nights, by young people who practiced getting hit until they could take it without flinching. What happened on those courthouse steps on April 19, 1960, was not spontaneous. It was the most meticulously prepared moral confrontation in the history of the American South. And it worked because the preparation was so complete that when the moment came, all it took was one question.
Do you feel it is wrong?
There is only one honest answer. And the mayor of Nashville, standing on the steps of his own courthouse with three thousand silent people watching, gave it.
Photo: Gerald Holly / The Tennessean