The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City by Benjamin Houston (review)

The field of oral history attracts practitioners who are interested both in the methodology of recording and preserving narrators’ stories and in disseminating the knowledge gathered from those recordings—that is, from people’s memo-ries—to help us understand the historical record better and more vividly. The second, applied aspect of oral history—blending oral sources into a historical narrative to provide a fuller and more complex picture of an event, idea, or epoch—is at the very heart of Benjamin Houston’s The Nashville Way. As the former director of the Remembering African American Pittsburgh oral history project at Carnegie Mellon University, Houston is well versed in all the ways in which oral histories are collected, stored, and utilized; what makes his monograph on Nashville’s struggle for civil rights so interesting, however, is the way in which he blends a plethora of oral histories seamlessly into his narrative, making the voices of the people just as significant a primary source for research as the myriad of traditional sources woven throughout. Doing so allows Houston to describe and outline a city “wrestling with and yet willfully ignoring its racial reality” in the middle of the twentieth century (12).

This is a detailed and comprehensive community study of one of the principal southern cities transformed during the civil rights era. The situations and circumstances that made Nashville a place to which the entire country looked for guidance were predicated on its citizens’ sense of etiquette and a Southern way of being that simultaneously fostered ideals of social justice while reinforcing the segregated color line indicative of a bygone era. When the Supreme Court issued its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it was the Nashville Plan—building schools in racially homogenous neighborhoods to, in essence, keep to the letter of the law by avoiding the issue altogether—that many other southern and northern communities adopted. Houston’s thorough analysis demonstrates the ways in which moderate white politicians in Nashville came to direct and control the conversation about segregation and integration, the results of which served as a template for other areas facing similar matters.

Houston then moves on to provide an exhaustive look at the many issues revealed by the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, in which, once again, Nashville played a central role. After the sit-ins, activists moved to challenge segregation in restaurants, bowling alleys, public pools, and a host of other areas where etiquette had long held racial division as normal, exposing the “countless ways that African Americans were not embraced in Nashville’s everyday life” (124). With the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, various social and political organizations opened their doors to African American members, but the rising tide of Black Power continued to challenge the formal ways in which race still divided Nashville. Houston uses Stokely Carmichael’s visit and speech in April 1967 to document how civil rights activists began to separate generationally, with many unwilling to “cast themselves as paragons of respectability in their neat dress and non-violent behavior,” while the older nonviolent activists were reluctant to accept a more radical approach that appealed to the younger members of the community (170). Carmichael’s talk exposed the long-standing frustration of many whites and blacks in the city, resulting in a riot taken to be a clear indication of a hardening of stances between the two broad racial groups; in a year filled with national scenes of violence both here and abroad, Nashville found itself situated in the middle of the crisis. The final chapter of The Nashville Way brings the story back home again, outlining how under the aegis of progress and urban renewal, the Model Cities program, together with the new interstate, divided the city much more effectively than ever before. The contest over...