by Greg Satell
As young, passionate, and idealistic students, many from out of town, they were clearly on the far left side of the Spectrum of Allies, with little connection to the other groups with higher thresholds of resistance. To a large extent, they had no voice in Nashville affairs, few ties to the community, and little shared consciousness with the people that did. Whatever action they took, it had to be one that would mobilize their passive allies and make inroads into those neutral and even passively opposed to the issue of racial integration. What they could not afford was to do anything that would make them appear to be out-of-town rabble-rousers, inspire resistance to change, and set the movement back.
Lawson, already an experienced organizer by this point, met regularly with local church, business, and social groups in Nashville’s black community in search of a unifying issue that could form the basis for fundamental change. As he did, one grievance stood out from the rest—the downtown department stores, where black women would shop and spend money, but still be denied the right to sit down at a lunch counter, rest their feet, and get some nourishment. Anybody who has ever gone shopping with their kids can empathize with how maddening, inconvenient, and humiliating the situation was. If the Nashville Student Movement targeted the lunch counters, they were sure to win allies among Nashville’s established black community.31
So at the end of November in 1959, the students began scouting out local department stores. They would show up smartly dressed, in suits and ties for the boys, and skirts and blouses for the girls. They would then buy a small item to establish themselves as paying customers and ask to be served at the lunch counter. When they were refused service, they politely asked to see the manager. A few minutes later, the manager came out and informed them, “it is our policy not to serve colored people here.” They left quietly, with little commotion except for a few hushed whispers among the patrons. The next Saturday, a similar test run was performed with identical results.32
After the Christmas break, training began in earnest. By this time, the attendance at Lawson’s workshops had swelled. The novice activists took turns sitting on chairs while the others hurled vicious epithets at them. Their resilience and dedication to Gandhi’s principles would be tested thoroughly before any of them would be allowed to join any active protest. Specific directions were given for every aspect of their conduct, from how they would sit and talk to what they should bring and what they needed to be prepared for. If the sit-ins were to fail, it wouldn’t be for lack of preparation.33
The campaign began in earnest on Saturday, February 13, 1961. The night before, a half foot of snow had fallen on Nashville, which Lewis took to be a good omen. The protestors made their way to First Baptist Church, where they were divided into five groups of 25 students or so. At eleven o’clock they marched out in double file a few blocks till they reached Fifth Avenue, Nashville’s main shopping area, where they split up, each group going into the store to which they’d been assigned.34
Lewis’s group entered Woolworth’s, where each activist made a small purchase. From there they made their way to the lunch counter, sat, and asked to be served. “We don’t serve niggers here,” they were told. Then the lunch counter was promptly closed. The students pulled out their schoolbooks, began to study, and waited for whatever came next.35
Before long, a group of young white men showed up and began spewing insults, but the protestors did not respond and kept their eyes straight ahead. At around 6 p.m., a runner from the First Baptist Church came to tell them it was time to go. The students calmly stood up and left in an orderly fashion. When they met the other protestors back at the church, all hugged and cheered. They had made their first strike, and it had all gone off just as planned.36
Sitting in a café with the lights off and calmly doing your schoolwork may seem like a minor victory, but nonetheless a Rubicon had been crossed. Black activists had taken action, and the white community had no idea what to do about it. The activists were well dressed, well spoken, polite, and refrained from raising their voices even when provoked. No laws had been broken. They had even made purchases at the store. A neutral onlooker would have to ask, “What’s the problem? Why would a business turn away a paying customer?”
As the sit-ins continued, the stores began to take countermeasures. Managers at a few of the stores began to stack lampshades, wastebaskets, pots, pans, and other items on the lunch counters so the students could no longer study as they sat. Still, neither black nor white customers could be served. The department stores were losing money, and the sit-ins continued without any sign of abating.37
At one point, it became clear that the segregationists had reached their wit’s end. Word came back to the activists at the First Baptist Church that any further actions would result in arrests. There were also credible rumors swirling that violence was about to break out and that the police would do nothing to stop it. Forewarned, John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette printed out leaflets with the following instructions:
DO NOT: 1. Strike back nor curse if abused.
2. Laugh out.
3. Hold conversations with the floor walker.
4. Leave your seat until your leader has given you permission to do so.
5. Block entrances to stores outside nor the aisles inside.
DO: 1. Show yourself to be friendly and courteous at all times.
2. Sit straight; always face the counter.
3. Report all serious incidents to your leader.
4. Refer information seekers to your leader in a polite manner.
5. Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Love and nonviolence is the way.
MAY GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU38
As the activists made their way into town the next day, they were met by a group of young white men shouting, “Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!” Police officers stood idly by as the students were pushed and shoved on the street. When the students finally made their way into the stores and sat down at the lunch counters, the young white toughs continued hurling insults at them and began to get physical. Lewis was punched in the ribs and knocked off his chair. He calmly got up and sat back down again. In other stores, students had mustard and ketchup poured on them. One white activist, Paul LaPrad, was beaten particularly viciously. After a short while the police showed up and made a point of ignoring the attackers. The officers arrested the protestors, who were led away in handcuffs as they sang “We Shall Overcome.”39
That day proved to be a turning point. Nashville, at least by southern standards, was a moderate city. Film crews had captured the beating of Paul LaPrad, and many had seen the mistreatment of the clean-cut student activists firsthand. The black community was enraged, and many whites were feeling very uncomfortable with the turn of events. Looking to defuse the situation, bail for the arrested protestors was dropped from the usual $100 to $5. They refused to pay, a practice among activists that went back to the women’s suffrage movement, and began to chant, “Jail without bail!” At a loss for what to do, the authorities ordered the students released on their own recognizance later that night. The next day they appeared in court and were each ordered to pay a $50 fine. They refused to pay that as well, much as Gandhi had done in a similar situation.40
By this point, older, more conservative blacks (up to this time, passive allies) had moved decidedly into the fold and actively supported the young activists. Footage of Paul LaPrad being kicked by the white toughs had been aired on national news, and telegrams of support from luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Belafonte began to arrive. The “respectable” citizens of Nashville were now beginning to feel even more uncomfortable. They just wanted the problem to go away.41
To defuse the situation, the mayor of Nashville, a moderate named Ben West, ordered the students released. He also announced a biracial committee to investigate the issue of segregated lunch counters and make recommendations. While the committee was deliberating, the protestors agreed to a short moratorium on sit-ins. Th
ings began to settle down.42
Yet the avid segregationists, those on the far right of the Spectrum of Allies, soon thwarted these efforts. James Stahlman, the staunchly conservative editor of the Nashville Banner, an influential local newspaper, wrote an editorial denouncing James Lawson as an “outside agitator” who was responsible for stirring up all the trouble. Under pressure, Lawson was expelled from the Vanderbilt Divinity School, and he was arrested two days later.43 It would, much like the violent response to the nonviolent Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, prove to be the demise of the status quo.
We can assume that the segregationists expected that Lawson’s jailing would quell the protests, but they were wildly off the mark. The students’ brave, yet reserved conduct at the sit-ins had made them heroes on campus. Many of their classmates, who were once reticent about the protests, now wanted to join them. The older black citizens, who at first didn’t want to get involved, now called for a boycott of the downtown stores. White shoppers also began to steer clear. Some simply wanted to avoid the unpleasantness, but others marched into the stores and turned in their credit cards as a show of solidarity with the activists. Downtown Nashville became a ghost town. Except for the protestors, no one wanted to be seen there. Much like with Yanukovych in Ukraine, anyone associated with the policies of the lunch counters risked being seen as a pariah.
As the Spectrum of Allies began to shift, Pillars of Support were pulled in as well. Media outlets, both local and national, were actively covering the events, often in terms favorable to the black activists. Future Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam, then a young reporter for the Tennessean, wrote some of his first big stories about the Nashville sit-ins. At black churches, ministers openly encouraged their parishioners to support the boycott. Black radio stations broadcast announcements to spread the word, “Don’t Buy Downtown.” Even some of the store owners themselves remarked that being able to serve black customers everywhere in the store except for the lunch counters didn’t make much sense to them either.44
With support for the movement growing seemingly by the minute, the segregationists made one last-ditch effort to stop it in its tracks. They bombed the house of one of Nashville’s most prominent black citizens, Z. Alexander Looby, a well-respected lawyer and city councilman. The act horrified almost everybody. Within hours, thousands were marching to City Hall to confront Mayor West. He came out to meet the crowd and made a plea for peace. “We are all Christians. Let us pray together,” the mayor said. “How about eating together?” came the reply. Then Diane Nash, who would go on to become a major figure in the civil rights movement, came to the front with a series of questions that had been prepared in advance.
DIANE NASH: “Will you use the prestige of your office to appeal to the citizens to stop racial discrimination?”
MAYOR BILL WEST: “I appeal to all citizens to end discrimination, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred.”
DIANE NASH: “Do you mean that to include lunch counters?”
MAYOR BILL WEST: “Little lady, I stopped segregation seven years ago at the airport when I first took office, and there’s been no trouble since.”
DIANE NASH: “Then, Mayor, do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?”
MAYOR BILL WEST: “Yes.”
The crowd erupted, and West almost immediately began to backtrack. “That’s up to the store managers, of course,” he said, but it was too late. The newspaper headlines the next day read “INTEGRATE COUNTERS—MAYOR.” By that point, everyone was relieved to resolve the situation. In the subsequent weeks, the store owners and the activists met to plan an orderly transition. Lunch counters would begin to be integrated on May 10, but only a small number of black patrons would ask to be served at first. Before long, the stores in downtown Nashville were thriving again.45
The Nashville sit-ins were a decisive victory, but still just one battle in the middle of a long war. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was more than four years earlier, and the major Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were still a long way off. For all their savvy and discipline, the members of the Nashville Student Movement could do little more by themselves. They needed to embed themselves into a larger network if they were to have an impact on a national scale.
With that in mind, a number of the student leaders, including Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, and Marion Barry, went on to help form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Jim Lawson continued to support the civil rights movement as a pastor and academic. He would eventually return to Nashville, decades later, to become a valued faculty member at Vanderbilt University, the same school where he was once expelled during the sit-ins. Marion Barry would go on to be a four-time mayor of Washington, D.C. John Lewis was elected to represent Georgia’s 5th district in the US House of Representatives in 1987. Today, he is often referred to as the “conscience of Congress.”
The civil rights movement was one of the most dramatic series of events in history, and it is easy to get awed by the heroism of the individual actors. The heroism of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Jim Lawson, John Lewis, and so many others who made such major contributions can blind us to the fact that they had absolutely no power to implement change themselves. They were, in the final analysis, nodes in a network. A movement, as the term suggests, is kinetic. It must travel from where it began to be effective. That’s what a cascade does.
So whatever change you want to make, whether it is in your community, your company, your industry, or throughout society as a whole, you must start with a plan to mobilize specific constituencies in the Spectrum of Allies to influence specific institutions in the Pillars of Support. If you want to make a difference and not just a point, you must make a plan. A movement without a plan is nothing more than a revolt.
CHAPTER 6
Networking the Movement
It takes a network to defeat a network.
—GENERAL STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL
In 1979, Rick Warren was finishing up his master’s degree in divinity at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. With a pregnant wife and less than $2,000 in the bank, he wanted to start a new congregation, but wasn’t quite sure where. He began to pore through census records in search of a suitable place and finally hit on the Saddleback Valley outside Los Angeles. Although it was one of the fastest-growing communities in the country, it had relatively few churches. He did some more research and discovered that while many residents identified as Christians, they didn’t attend services regularly. It seemed like he had found just the kind of place he was looking for.1
So in December of that same year, with his wife and four-year-old daughter, Warren packed his things into a U-Haul, headed for Orange County, and began looking for a place to live. He walked into a real estate office and introduced himself to the first agent he found, a man named Don Dale. Dale asked Warren the usual questions, what he did for a living, how much money he had to spend, and so on. Warren happily replied that he was an unemployed minister, without a congregation, and had little money. Dale found him a place to rent that day and became the first member of Saddleback’s congregation, which, of course, didn’t actually exist yet. Rick Warren just had that kind of effect on people.2
He also had big dreams. He wanted to build a congregation like no other. Yet much like Mahatma Gandhi when he returned to India from South Africa or Jim Lawson before the Nashville sit-ins, Warren didn’t start planning his campaign immediately, but first set out to carefully survey the terrain. He spent three months going door-to-door, introducing himself in his own friendly way and asking people why they didn’t like going to church. The people he met said the services were boring, irrelevant to their daily lives, and lacked adequate programs for kids. They also hated the outdated organ music, the formal dress, and the fact that churches were always asking for money. Warren took careful notes and began to formulate a plan to build his flock among the “unchurched” residents of Orange County.3
He bega
n holding prayer groups in his small living room with sermons that focused on real, everyday problems, like how to handle discouragement, deal with stress, feel good about yourself, and take care of your family. His direct, plainspoken, and easygoing style began to attract followers, and before long he was renting out school auditoriums. He continued to dress casually, and instead of the regular hymns and organ music, his services featured an electric guitar. During the week, he tended tirelessly to his flock, making himself available for counseling in congregants’ homes and on the phone. Before the end of the year, his congregation had grown to 200 members.4
Eventually, the long hours got to him. He collapsed right in the middle of a service. “I’m sorry, folks, I’m going to have to sit down,” he told the congregation. He had been suffering from anxiety and depression for years, but the long hours and the struggle to build his church had finally gotten to him. He drove to Arizona to recuperate for a while. When he returned, he assigned everyone in the church to a small group that met every week to take over some of the load he had been bearing himself. Surprisingly, what started out as a laborsaving strategy to preserve his sanity turned out to be a hit with the congregation. As it turned out, the members loved the groups.5
“Now when people come to Saddleback and see the giant crowds on weekends, they think that’s our success,” Warren told New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg. “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety-five percent of this church is what happens during the week inside those small groups. The congregation and the small groups are like a one-two punch. You have this big crowd to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place, and a small group of friends to help you focus on how to be faithful. Together, they’re like glue. We have over five thousand small groups now. It’s the only thing that makes a church this size manageable. Otherwise I’d work myself to death and 95 percent of the congregation would never receive the attention they came here looking for.”6