The success of Nashville's highly organized movement was both a model and an inspiration to other cities, Wynn said.
“The story of Nashville's impact, I've not seen anywhere in writing yet,” Lawson said Friday. But the Freedom Rides would have ended with the first group of beaten, demoralized riders who decided they could not go on, if it had not been for the Nashville students.
The Freedom Rides were bus trips designed to challenge segregation in areas of the deep South that were unwilling to accept a Supreme Court ruling that found the segregation of interstate travel facilities — such as bus station waiting areas, restrooms and restaurants — to be illegal.
The first bus was stopped in Alabama where the riders were badly beaten and voted not to continue.
“Because of our emphasis on nonviolence, we knew the Freedom Rides could not be stopped by the Klan and the white citizens movement,” Lawson said.
John Siegenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, which hosted the panel, and former reporter and editor at The Tennessean, was working for Robert Kennedy when Nash called to say Nashville students were organizing more Freedom Rides.
“I said, 'Please don't do this. You're going to get somebody killed,’” Siegenthaler recalled. “And she said, ‘We signed our wills last night.’”
