I have nothing but praise to offer Ezell Blair Jr. (Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil, the four North Carolina A & T State University students who conducted the Feb. 1, 1960 sit-in at the counter of the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C. These four men deserve our national thanks for their roles in igniting a generation of young people to take part in one of the great political campaigns in American history.
Which is why when I think of the sit-ins these days, I linger on the roles of two older people whose names don’t make the headlines. James Lawson and Ella Baker found brilliant ways to channel and guide the energy of the young student protesters who joined the sit-ins in cities across the South. Lawson and Baker (among many others) helped ensure that the sit-ins gained an enduring power that was needed in the years ahead to mount a frontal challenge to entrenched Southern racism.
Lawson was the spiritual leader of the Nashville Student Movement, the group of young people that was in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “the best organized and the most disciplined in the Southland.” Their number included Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard LaFayette and Marion Barry.
Starting in the fall of 1958, Lawson held weekly workshops on nonviolent resistance at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church in Nashville. Lawson, about 30 years old at the time, was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School. (He was later expelled from Vanderbilt for his role in leading demonstrations.) A pacifist, Lawson had served time in federal prison for refusing to register for the draft during the Korean War. He lived several years in India, where he studied the tactics of Mohandas Gandhi.
In his memoir, Congressman John Lewis, a former Nashville student activist, recounts Lawson’s detailed teachings on various aspects of Gandhi’s thought. Lawson embraced nonviolence as a way of life. In the workshops, Lawson staged practice confrontations. The young people learned how to curl up to protect their internal organs if they were being assaulted. They also practiced maintaining eye contact with their assailants in the midst of an attack as a way of “disarming” the attacker.
On Nov. 28, 1959, about a month before the Greensboro sit-ins grabbed national headlines, the Nashville group conducted a practice sit-in at a local department store. The young people entered Harvey’s department store and sat down at the counter. The students were rebuffed by a waitress and they asked to speak to the manager, who came and told them that store policy was to not serve colored people at the counter. They thanked him and left the store. The Nashville group conducted a second “test” sit-in in December 1959. When the Greensboro sit-ins occurred, the Nashville Student Movement was, in a sense, beaten to the punch, though what the four A&T students did was not all that different from what the Nashville students had done twice during their “test” sit-ins.
Long after the sit-ins had died down, the Nashville group played a key role in the 1961 Freedom Rides. And they were core members of the group that emerged out of the sit-ins, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
