Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  When the Brown decision was handed down, black people hoped that the foundation on which Jim Crow had built his house would collapse. But in the years that followed, it became clear that the house would have to be dismantled brick by brick—on the buses, at the lunch counters, in the voting booths.

  In the wake of the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, the NAACP had opened several more Youth Council chapters throughout the country. The organization knew that young blacks were eager to get involved in the civil rights movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also began teaching blacks how they might participate in the struggle. As SCLC representatives, Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy traveled the South, teaching Christian pacifism. At the same time, they worked to help Montgomery adjust to desegregated buses.

  A group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) printed several thousand copies of a pamphlet, in comic-book format, entitled Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. The publication offered instruction in passive resistance and massive nonviolent action against segregation. The FOR distributed these “comic books” throughout the South. Though originally intended for people who didn’t usually read books, the pamphlets found their way onto college campuses.

  In the fifties, James Lawson was a divinity student at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. A firm believer in pacifism, the young black man had chosen to go to prison during the Korean War rather than take up arms. He was paroled under the recognizance of a group of Methodist ministers, who sent him to India as a missionary. Lawson spent three years there, learning about Mohandas Gandhi’s use of nonviolent resistance. On his return to the United States, he enrolled at Oberlin College’s theology school in his home state of Ohio. But when he learned of the Montgomery bus boycott and how the people of that city were applying the principles of nonviolence in a mass protest, he traveled to Alabama to meet with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

  For several years, FOR minister Glenn Smiley and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin had been promoting Gandhi’s ideas as a tool for blacks in the United States. After listening to James Lawson explain Gandhi’s tactics of massive nonviolent resistance, King encouraged the twenty-nine-year-old Lawson to spread the ideals of nonviolence throughout the civil rights movement. Lawson left Oberlin and became southern field secretary for the FOR. This interracial organization had been founded in 1914 as a group devoted to the principles of nonviolence. Lawson was stationed in Nashville, where he resumed his studies at Vanderbilt. At the time, Nashville was sometimes called the Athens of the South and had twelve colleges and universities.

  Lawson shared the hopes and frustrations felt by so many blacks in the late fifties. The victories in the Supreme Court were heartening, but after 1956, blacks across the South were anxiously awaiting the next development.

  James Lawson, a leader of the sit-in movement.

  “When people are suffering,” says Lawson, looking back on the decade, “they don’t want rhetoric and processes which seem to go slowly … When they are suffering and they see their people suffering, they want direct participation. They want to be able to say, ‘What I’m doing here gives me power and is going to help us change this business.’”

  In 1958, along with Glenn Smiley, a white FOR minister who had helped King with the Montgomery bus boycott, Lawson began offering workshops on nonviolence in Nashville and across the South. The men taught students and other activists how to use the tactic of passive resistance. Lawson also traveled to other southern campuses to train students, both black and white. In churches and schools he recruited people for the cause of nonviolence. By 1960, many black campuses in the South had heard of the nonviolence workshops.

  The workshops demonstrated that nonviolence was not for the faint of heart. In Nashville, participants had to sit quietly while other students, acting the role of segregationists, jeered, poked, and spit at them. Nonviolence required compassion, commitment, courage, and faith, but most importantly, it required discipline.

  Diane Nash, a student at Fisk University in Nashville, was from Chicago. She could not accept the radical segregation of the South and was determined to do something about it. When a friend told her of Jim Lawson’s workshops, now held every Tuesday night, she decided to enroll. In the workshops, Nash explains, “Students in Nashville, as well as some of the people who lived in the Nashville community, were trained and educated in [nonviolent] philosophies and strategies. I remember we used to role-play, and we would do things like pretend we were sitting at lunch counters, in order to prepare ourselves to do that. We would practice things such as how to protect your head from a beating, how to protect each other. If one person was taking a severe beating, we would practice other people putting their bodies in between that person and the violence, so that the violence could be more distributed and hopefully no one would get seriously injured.

  The Fellowship of Reconciliation

  Cover of “comic book” produced by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

  Martin Luther King, Jr., was not the first to champion nonviolent protest in America. The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) has been preaching nonviolence since the early part of the twentieth century. Founded at Cambridge University in 1914 by Henry Hodgkin, an English Quaker, and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, pacifist chaplain to the Kaiser, the FOR was established to promote pacifism and international understanding. The organization opened its first American chapter in 1915.

  Although the FOR is primarily concerned with the dissemination of intellectual ideas—the majority of its members are students, professors, and ministers—the fellowship does occasionally engage in direct action. The group sponsored the first “Freedom Ride” in 1947. Called “The Journey of Reconciliation,” this project sent a biracial group of thirteen on a bus ride through the upper South. Later, the FOR played a key role in the Montgomery bus boycott by sending two of its staffers to serve as consultants: the Reverend Glenn Smiley, FOR national field secretary, and Bayard Rustin, former FOR race relations secretary. Both worked closely with King in planning movement strategy. “The role that I played with Martin,” Smiley says, “was one in which I literally lived with him hours and hours and hours at a time, and he pumped me about what nonviolence was.” When the boycott ended, Smiley sat next to King on the first integrated bus ride through Montgomery.

  The FOR used a $5,000 grant to put out a “comic book” commemorating the event and popularizing the philosophy of nonviolence. The group distributed some 200,000 copies of this ten-cent booklet. Ironically, the publication reached more university students than the semiliterate adults for whom it was originally written.

  The FOR and its members have helped create numerous groups that work for social change. These include the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Workers Defense League, and the Congress of Racial Equality. At present, the FOR has approximately 32,000 members worldwide.

  “During the workshops,” recalls Nash, “we had begun what we called ‘testing the lunch counters.’ We sent teams of people into department-store restaurants, to attempt to be served. We had anticipated that we’d be refused, and we were. We asked to speak to the manager, and engaged him in a conversation. [We would bring up] the fact that it really was immoral to discriminate against people because of their skin color.”

  John Lewis, a student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, was encouraged by the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, president of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (the local affiliate of the SCLC), to attend one of the workshops. Lewis had grown up on a farm about fifty miles south of Montgomery, Alabama, and had been deeply moved by the Montgomery bus boycott. Like Diane Nash, he was anxious to participate in the movement. “The workshops became almost like an elective [course] to students like me,” he said. “It was the most important thing we were doing. We became a real group of believers.”

  Lewis, Nash, and a group of other students started an organiza
tion they called the Nashville Student Movement. Nash was elected head of the central committee. They hoped to use the tactics they had learned in the nonviolence workshops to abolish segregation in Nashville, starting with department-store lunch counters, where blacks were not served at the time. If Woolworth’s was happy to take their money for socks and toothpaste at one counter, the dime store should also take their money at the lunch counter, the students reasoned.

  They planned to send a group of kids to sit at a lunch counter, try to order something, and refuse to budge. If these students were arrested, others would take their place. If they were served, they’d go on to the next lunch counter and “sit in” there. When the lunch counters were integrated, they would target segregated movie houses or libraries.

  But on February 1, independently of the Nashville activists, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at an F. W. Woolworth Company store. The students had spent the previous night debating what could be done about segregation.

  All four had been members of the NAACP Youth Council. At least one of them had read a copy of the FOR “comic book” on nonviolence. They had heard about black people demanding service at whites-only restaurants, and they knew that doing so could land them in jail—no pleasant thought for a black person in the South. But they talked each other into it, and the next day went to the Woolworth’s on North Elm Street.

  Joseph McNeil bought a tube of toothpaste. His friend Franklin McCain bought some school supplies. Then they, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr., sat at the lunch counter and ordered coffee from the white waitress. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we don’t serve colored here.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said McCain. “You just served me at a counter two feet away. Why is it that you serve me at one counter and deny me at another? Why not stop serving me at all the counters?” A black dishwasher walked over. “You know you’re not supposed to be here,” she said to the young men, calling them “a disgrace to the race.”

  The four students sat there, without the coffee they had ordered, for over half an hour. At 5:30 P.M., when the store closed, they left. Unsure of what to do next, they sought advice from Dr. George Simpkins, a prominent black dentist. He asked the young men to wait before staging another sit-in, and he wrote to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a group the FOR had helped establish in 1942 to deal with civil rights problems. A week later, CORE’s New York office sent a representative, Gordon Carey, who organized more sit-ins by the students. McNeil, McCain, and others targeted Woolworth’s and S. H. Kress and Company, another department store. The students politely requested food, remained at the counter when they were refused service, and kept silent.

  Soon signs appeared in the stores’ windows: “NO TRESPASSING,” “We Reserve the Right to Service the Public As We See Fit,” and “CLOSED—In the Interest of Public Safety.”

  The students, meeting with Carey, developed a strategy involving enough students to sustain daily sit-ins until segregation was defeated. The SCLC’s Fred Shuttlesworth was in North Carolina the week of the first sit-in in Greensboro. Seeing an opportunity for action, he called Ella Baker, the SCLC’s executive director. An energetic woman in her late fifties, Baker was one of the organization’s most militant members. She began calling her many colleagues on campuses and churches in major southern cities. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “It is time to move.”

  Diane Nash, leader of the Nashville Student Movement, at age twenty.

  The first Greensboro sit-in participants. From right to left: David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil.

  Gordon Carey arranged for activists to begin training students in other cities for more sit-ins. Daisy Bates, in Little Rock, Arkansas, heard of the sit-ins through the movement network and sent people to that city’s Philander Smith College to recruit students for training. Students from Alabama State College in Montgomery met at Ralph Abernathy’s home to organize sit-ins.

  “When the students in Greensboro sat in on February 1,” recalls Diane Nash, “we simply made plans to join their effort by sitting in at the same chains … We were surprised and delighted to hear reports of other cities joining in the sit-ins. We started feeling the power of the idea whose time had come. We had no inkling that the movement would become so widespread.”

  As news of the sit-ins spread through the nation’s press and students from various colleges shared information by telephone, the sit-in tactic took hold elsewhere. In Tallahassee, whites joined black students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, sharing food at lunch counters to show their disregard for segregated cafeterias. In a span of two weeks, there were sit-ins in eleven cities. But the segregationists also began to turn on the heat. In High Point, North Carolina, the Kress’ store removed its lunch-counter stools entirely. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, ammonia was thrown at students during a sit-in. In some communities, hecklers threw “itching powder” on the students and chanted at the black girls, “How about a date when we integrate?” When students in Raleigh, North Carolina, lined up to go into a Woolworth’s, they were arrested for trespassing.

  Students in northern cities soon adopted the idea of demonstrating. Martin Smolin, a student at Columbia University, led the picketing of Woolworth’s in New York. “People have asked me why northerners, especially white people, who have been in the majority in our picketing demonstrations in New York, take an active part in an issue which doesn’t concern them,” said Smolin. “My answer is that injustice anywhere is everybody’s concern.”

  “It is with a desire to do something that many northern white students look at the sit-in movement of their southern Negro counterparts … That the northern response has been almost unanimously favorable is no surprise,” wrote Ted Dienstfrey, a student at Columbia. “Of all the current social and political issues—the cold war, disarmament, the draft—the double standard [of] integration is the only one which does not have to be discussed.”

  Students and the Movement: An Interview with Diane Nash

  Diane Nash left her native Chicago in 1956 to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1959, Nash transferred to Fisk University in Nashville. The first chairman of the central committee of the Nashville Student Movement, Nash led the campaign to desegregate the lunch counters of Nashville’s department stores. She organized sit-ins, trained students, and selected the Nashville contingent for the Freedom Rides.

  Because I grew up in Chicago, I didn’t have an emotional relationship to segregation. I understood the facts and stories, but there was not an emotional relationship. When I went south and saw the signs that said ‘white’ and ‘colored,’ and I actually could not drink out of that water fountain or go to that ladies’ room, I had a real emotional reaction. I remember the first time it happened was at the Tennessee State Fair. I had a date with a young man, and I started to go to the ladies’ room. And it said ‘white’ and ‘colored,’ and I really resented that. I was outraged.

  In Chicago, at least, I had had access to public accommodations and lunch counters. So, my response was, “Who’s trying to change these things?” I remember getting depressed because I encountered what I thought was so much apathy. At first I couldn’t find anyone, and many of the students were saying, “Why are you concerned about that?” They were not interested in trying to effect some kind of change, I thought.

  And then I talked to Paul LePrad, who told me about the nonviolent workshops that Jim Lawson was conducting. They were taking place a couple of blocks off campus. Jim had been to India, and he had studied the movement [of] Mohandas Gandhi. He also had been a conscientious objector and had refused to fight in the Korean War. He really is the person that brought Gandhi’s philosophy and strategies of nonviolence to this country. He conducted weekly workshops where students in Nashville, as well as some of the people who lived in the Nashville community, were trained and educated in these philosophies an
d strategies. There were many things I learned in those workshops that I have used for the rest of my life.

  Diane Nash (second from left) sits with other blacks enjoying a meal at an integrated lunch counter.

  I remember realizing that with what we were doing, trying to abolish segregation, we were coming up against governors of seven states, judges, politicians, businessmen, and I remember thinking, “I’m only 22 years old. What do I know? What am I doing?” I felt very vulnerable. So when we heard that other cities had demonstrations, it really helped, because there were more of us. And I think we started feeling the power of an idea whose time had come.

  The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience to be seeing a group of people who would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough that you would put your body between them and danger. I was afraid of going to jail. I said, “I’ll do telephone work, and I’ll type, but I’m really afraid to go to jail.” But when the time came to go to jail, I was far too busy to be afraid. And we had to go, that’s what happened.

  I think it’s really important that young people today understand that the movement of the sixties was really a people’s movement. The media and history seem to record it as Martin Luther King’s movement, but young people should realize that it was people just like them, their age, that formulated goals and strategies, and actually developed the movement. When they look around now, and see things that need to be changed, they should say: “What can I do? What can my roommate and I do to effect that change?”