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T H R E E The Shame and the Glory The 1960 Sit-ins The shattering sound of crashing plates in February 1960 signaled that something unusual was happening in downtown Nashville. “They must have dropped two thousand dollars’ worth of dishes that day. It was almost like a cartoon,” remembers student leader Diane Nash. “One in particular, she was so nervous, she picked up dishes and she dropped one, and she’d pick up another one, and she’d drop it.” It made for surreal feelings, Nash thought: “It was really funny, and we were sitting there trying not to laugh, because we thought that laughing would be insulting and we didn’t want to create that kind of atmosphere. At the same time we were scared to death.” The clamor came as skittish white waitresses first faced African American students sitting at lunch counters waiting to be served. Nash also recalls tearful cashiers and sweaty store-managers; strange feelings wormed through whites viscerally uncomfortable in encountering African Americans both literally and figuratively seated in forbidden space. It was a scene replayed across the South as waves of black students energized with a new assertiveness confounded white sensibilities by taking their place at lunch counters and brazenly challenging the usual racial deference. Yet, Nashville ’s experience was unique. In time, this episode would be at the forefront of the city’s civil rights legacy and held up as a national and indeed international model for nonviolent direct action. The campaign was an especially important formative experience to a core nucleus of leaders associated with Nashville who later became key civil rights figures as the movement spread South and beyond. But the lessons of this episode should not be confined to this legacy alone. If nothing else, the situation highlighted the ability of African Americans to marshal multiple tactics to confront the hypocrisies of Nashville’s racial etiquette. The backstory to Nashville’s 1960 sit-ins began when Reverend Kelly Miller Smith was part of the founding of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc) in 1957. Tall and enormously “dignified and sophisticated ,” Smith had emerged from Nashville’s school desegregation crisis as a lead- T H E S H A M E A N D T H E G L O R Y · 83 ing spokesman for black Nashville. Backed by his congregation at First Baptist Capitol Hill, the lone piece of black-owned property in Nashville’s downtown and the place of worship for much of the city’s black elite, he moved among poor blacks and white power brokers with equal ease. Tennessean reporter David Halberstam, who later wrote The Children about the Nashville sit-ins, remembers Smith as the “gentlest and most subtle” of leaders and, perhaps most important, he “was not very territorial” about his activist turf. Inspired by the sclc founding, Smith convened a meeting of local black ministers on January 18, 1958, at Capers Memorial cme Church to form the Nashville Christian Leadership Council (nclc). Ongoing tensions over school desegregation figured prominently in everyone’s mind, along with the general muting of protest activity that had prevailed across the South in the post-Brown era. Frustration about the Nashville Plan’s mixed results, fears about John Kasper’s vigilantism, and worries about angry black ministers who had acquired guns in response fed the nclc’s collective resolve for resolute but respectable black protest. Yet deciding on what exactly made the nclc special remained more difficult. The group immediately began assisting local voter registration efforts, but also aspired to a new path. Key members had activist experience. Metz Rollins, secretary of the United Presbyterian Church in town, for example, had participated in the Tallahassee bus boycott in 1956, and fiery C. T. Vivian, an editor at the black National Baptist Convention, had similar experience with sit-in protests in Peoria, Illinois, in 1947. Highlander Folk School also played a role in incubating nascent black struggle by sponsoring workshops that linked Nashvillians with other personalities working for racial justice elsewhere. Smith noted that the nclc wished to use “methods heretofore untried” so as to highlight “the spiritual implications of the struggle” for the “grassroots of the community.” However, although the ministers advocated “Christian social action generally,” as Smith later wrote, “nothing was said about nonviolence at this time. The fact is that none of us knew enough about it to bring it into the discussion in any meaningful way.” Another issue was whether...

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