Lunch Counter Sit-Ins by Danielle Smith-Llera

Author:Danielle Smith-Llera [Smith-Llera, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: lunch counter; civil rights; sit ins; protests; Greensboro; North Carolina; African Americans; Woolworth’s; segregation; integration; discrimination; NAACP; Emmett Till; Martin Luther King Jr.
Publisher: Capstone
Published: 2020-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

A PEACEFUL WAR

Soon after the Greensboro Four began their protest in early February 1960, John Lewis remembered a telephone ringing in Nashville, Tennessee. Lewis was a Fisk University student at the time. He recalled a North Carolina student on the line asking, “What can you do to support the students in Greensboro?”44 Black students at Nashville universities were more than ready to help. “No longer did we have to explain nonviolence to people,”45 said CORE leader and civil rights activist James Farmer. “Thanks to Martin Luther King, it was a household word.”46 Since 1958 James Lawson, a theology student at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, had held workshops to prepare protesters for sit-ins. Through role-playing, participants practiced not giving in to hatred or anger even while facing abuse and humiliation. Their power as peaceful protesters lay in staying calm and keeping their minds focused on the goal.47

Rehearsal time ended on February 13, 1960. The first day of the Nashville protests was dramatic compared to the quiet start of the Greensboro protests. Not four, but 124, protesters walked into downtown Nashville’s Woolworth’s and two other stores, made purchases, and sat calmly at the whites-only counters. The manager closed the store, but protesters returned the next day, quietly taking shifts. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just,” said Lewis, then 19, “you have a moral obligation, a mission, and a mandate, to stand up, to speak up and speak out, and get in the way, get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”48 Trouble arrived two weeks later. A group of whites pulled protesters off stools and beat them. When police arrived, they arrested more than 80 protesters. Not one of the white attackers was arrested. Jail did not intimidate 21-year-old sit-in leader Diane Nash: “I want a good America and I want that just a little bit more than a college degree.”49 The risk of jail did not stop more students from joining the Nashville sit-ins.

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