Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 87

An outgrowth of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council (NCLC), which was founded by the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith on January 18, 1958, the Nashville Student Movement (NSM) produced a cadre of leaders in the modern Civil Rights Movement. These leaders included, but were not limited to Marion Barry, James Bevel, John Lewis, Diane J. Nash, Bernard Lafayette Jr., the Reverends James Lawson, and C.T. Vivian, among others. They actively participated and provided leadership in national civil rights organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, as well as leadership in several local efforts across the southeast to end racial discrimination. In keeping with the SCLC, of which NCLC was an affiliate, the Nashville Student Movement adhered to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved community” credo and to the precept of a city without a color line.

The non-violent resister must be willing to accept suffering without retaliation and to exchange love for hate of the opponent.

The NCLC began holding workshops in March of 1958, the first of which was conducted by Lawson, Glen Smiley, and Anna Holden of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), at Bethel A.M.E. Church. Lawson, a student at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School, became a member of NCLC’s board and projects committee chair. He and Smiley had frequently lectured and held workshops on black college campuses. Focusing on Christian nonviolence and love, workshop leaders presented the tenets of nonviolence as direct active resistance to violence. At the core of the nonviolence philosophy was the ethic of agape love: loving a neighbor for his own sake and not because of a person’s friendliness. The non-violent resister must be willing to accept suffering without retaliation and to exchange love for hate of the opponent. Nonviolence, according to Lawson, denied the “segregationist power structure of its major weapon: the manipulation of law or law enforcement to keep the Negro in his place.” Later, the workshops were moved to Clark Memorial Methodist Church, which was in proximity to Nashville’s black colleges and universities.

Word of the workshops soon spread to American Baptist College, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University). Students from these educational institutions began attending the workshops. Among those who attended regularly were Peggy Alexander (Fisk), Marion Barry (Fisk), James Bevel (ABC), Angeline Butler (Fisk), Bernard Lafayette, Jr. (ABC), white exchange student Paul LaPrad (Fisk), John Lewis (ABC), and Diane Nash (Fisk). These students, under Lawson’s tutelage, became workshop instructors for others who joined. In October 1959, the NSM formally came into existence with student participation from all four black institutions of higher learning. After having gone through months of training in the tactics and philosophy of direct non-violent resistance, the students were eager to transfer its values and beliefs into practical application.

In November and December of 1959, the NSM, with Nash as chair, and leaders from NCLC conducted experimental sit-ins at local department stores, three months before the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins of February 1, 1960, which captured national media attention. However, the Greensboro participants lacked the training, leadership, and organizational structure that the NSM possessed. Prepared to make Nashville a city without a color line, less than two weeks later the NSM began the process of dismantling the city’s restrictive and exclusive racial culture. Although they endured physical abuse and incarceration, the students steadfastly remained committed to the principles of the beloved community and direct non-violent resistance. Considered by King to be one of the best organized and most disciplined student movements, the NSM, with its sit-ins, boycotts, mass demonstrations, and confrontation with then-Mayor Ben West after the bombing of attorney Z. Alexander Looby’s home, helped Nashville become one of the first cities in the South to begin desegregating its lunch counters.

In the midst of the sit-in demonstrations and the economic boycott, the coterie of Nashville student leaders was among those students who met in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Ella Baker of the SCLC, in April of 1960, to form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By the time the organizational meeting ended on April 17, the student delegation elected Marion Berry as their first chairman of the SNCC and Diane Nash as head of protest activities and chairman of the coordinating committee between students and adults. Over the next few years, as members of the SNCC, leaders of the NSM played a major role in keeping the CORE from aborting the Freedom Rides from Washington, D.C., after being met with violence in Anniston, Alabama. Leaders of the NSM also played a role in the 1963 March on Washington and Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Linda T. Wynn