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43 CHAPTER TWO Nonviolent Direct Action and the Rise of a Southern Student Movement THE TENSION BEFORE a demonstration was palpable, enough to make it difficult for a student to concentrate on her professor, on the day’s material. Looming in the near future was another sit-in and the possibility of jail, violence , or both. These were heavy burdens for someone in late adolescence, especially when she tried to juggle the demands of a movement with the more mundane but no less important responsibilities of a college student. Some observers suggested that students had less to lose than “adults” did by participating in demonstrations, but the costs could still be great: parental disappointment, the shame of jail, the possibility of expulsion and with it the loss of an important avenue to upward mobility and a better life. “People used to tickle me, talking about how brave I was, sitting in, and marching, and what have you, because I was so scared,” Nashville activist and Fisk student Diane Nash later recalled. “All the time. It was like wall-to-wall terrified. I can remember sitting in class, many times, before demonstrations, and I knew, like, we were going to have a demonstration that afternoon. And the palms of [my] hands would be so sweaty, and I would be so tense and tight inside. I was really afraid.”1 Carolyn Long, a student at Clark College in Atlanta, later recalled dealing with the challenge of balancing activism with academics: “While we were in jail, we had books and things brought to us, and we studied while we were there. We never missed classes. . . . It was like the whole purpose of going to school was to get an education, and nothing was more important than that.” Thus, Banks was “devastated” when, in the midst of the Atlanta student campaign against segregation, she received a D in conversational French. The professor, who was white, combined the low grade with “a very, very long dissertation on why blacks should stay in their place.” She later took the same class at nearby 44 CHAPTER TWO Morris Brown College and received an A. And she continued her activism and her collegiate career, eventually earning a degree and getting a job at the same Rich’s department store she had helped desegregate in the early 1960s.2 Nash, Long, and other undergraduates in their late teens or early twenties fueled the sit-in movement, a dramatic, nonviolent challenge to segregation that swept much of the South in the early 1960s, changed the course of the civil rights movement, and laid the groundwork for the 1960s student movement. These activists often saw themselves and were perceived by others through the prism of their age. Theirs was a new generation that would step outside of expectations and challenge authority. “I remember realizing that with what we were doing, trying to abolish segregation,” Nash later commented, “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?”3 The actions of Nash and others provided some of the most important building blocks for an emerging generational identity that crossed racial and regional boundaries. But this identity, which emphasized the importance of challenging authority, was intermingled with a separate but related vocational identity. These activists not only were young but also were students, and the fact that their actions grew from a particular educational environment was also significant. The sit-in movement had important implications not only for what became the 1960s generation but also for the South’s and the nation’s college and university campuses. The introduction of nonviolent direct action opened up new possibilities for student political mobilization on black southern campuses while prompting students to ask new questions about what it meant to be a student and what should constitute a college education. Nonviolent direct action was not new in 1960. The kinds of actions that fall under its umbrella—boycotts, marches, and an array of physical challenges to segregation that included what would be known by late 1960 as sit-ins—had occurred sporadically since at least the era of Reconstruction. The Fellowship of Reconciliation (for) had explored the use of nonviolence to achieve social change since its founding in 1914, and its affiliate, the Congress of Racial Equality (core), had been experimenting with forms of nonviolent direct action since its inception in 1942. In 1947, an...

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