Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  When a reporter asked Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem if he was advocating that Negroes in New York stay out of national chain stores such as Woolworth’s, Powell answered, “Oh, no. I’m advocating that American citizens interested in democracy stay out of these stores.”

  As northern sympathy for the students grew, southern segregationists insisted that northerners were racists, too, but hid their own bigotry while unfairly painting the South as a repressive, uncivilized region. The Cincinnati Post and Times Star acknowledged the truth of these charges and commented, “Discrimination against citizens with darker skin is not a southern problem, alone … [in Chicago] Negro college graduates work as redcaps because jobs in which they could use their training are closed to them. It is said, with some justification, that in some respects a Negro is better treated in the South than North. The Southerner, from long association, tends toward a genuine affection for individual Negroes, while resenting Negroes in the abstract. The Northerner on the other hand is inclined to uphold Negro rights, in the abstract, while doing little or nothing to help individual Negroes get an even break.”

  In general, white southerners viewed the sit-ins skeptically. Bernie Schweid, a sympathetic white businessman in Nashville, says, “Most people did not take the sit-ins too seriously at the beginning, because they felt … they are agitators, these are students, some from New York … they’re not ‘our’ Negroes. ‘Our’ Negroes are happy.”

  White southern segregationists, and even the merchants affected, predicted that this “latest campus fad” would soon pass. CORE had held sit-ins in Chicago in the 1940s, achieving only mild success and prompting little reaction in other cities. In 1958, Kansas and Oklahoma NAACP branches had won some success with sit-ins, but again the tactic faded. Officials in southern cities felt that they had only to wait and this latest problem would go away.

  But by the end of February, the New York Times wrote in an editorial that “… the movement [has] spread from North Carolina, to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee and involved 15 cities … Students of race relations in the area contend that the movement reflects the growing dissatisfaction over the slow pace of desegregation in schools and other public facilities.”

  By February 18, Nashville’s black students had mobilized 200 people for sit-ins at the city’s major stores. “The first sit-in we had was really funny,” says Diane Nash. “The waitresses were nervous. They must have dropped $2,000 worth of dishes that day … It was almost like a cartoon … we were sitting there trying not to laugh [but] at the same time we were scared to death.”

  Nash said people would say “how brave I was for sitting in and marching, [but] I was … wall-to-wall terrified. I can remember sitting in class many times [when] I knew we were going to have a demonstration that afternoon. And the palms of my hands would be so sweaty. I was really afraid.”

  The students’ fears were realistic. On Saturday, February 27, a group of white Nashville teens attacked the sit-in students, yanking them off their lunch-counter seats. Paul Laprad, a white Fisk student, described the scene. “Curiously, there were no police inside the store when the white teenagers and others stood in the aisles insulting us, blowing smoke in our faces, grinding out cigarette butts on our backs and finally pulling us off our stools and beating us. Those of us pulled off our seats tried to regain them as soon as possible, but none of us fought back in anger.”

  When the Nashville police arrived, they arrested not the white teens who had started the fight, but eighty-one of the protestors for “disorderly conduct.” Diane Nash recalls, “The police said, ‘Okay, all you nigras, get up from the lunch counter or we’re going to arrest you.’ [Then] they said, ‘Everybody’s under arrest.’ So we all got up and marched to the wagon. Then they turned and looked around at the lunch counter again, and the second wave of students had all taken seats … then a third wave. No matter what they did and how many they arrested, there was still a lunch counter full of students there.”

  Nashville’s black adults responded to the arrests by raising nearly $50,000 to bail out the students. The prominent black lawyer Z. Alexander Looby agreed to represent them in court.

  The judge literally turned his back as attorney Looby argued that the black students were victims who had been beaten by hooligans and had not caused any disturbance. Looby cut short his argument and then said, staring at the judge’s back, “What’s the use!”

  When the magistrate finally turned to face the court, he pronounced the defendants guilty and fined them $150 plus court costs. But the students did not quit their sit-ins. On March 2, sixty-three were arrested for sitting in at Nashville’s Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals. Two weeks later four blacks were finally served at the Greyhound terminal. It was the first sit-in victory in the nation, but it came at a price. The four students who were served were badly beaten as they tried to eat, and the next day two unexploded bombs were discovered at the terminal.

  By late March, the police had orders not to arrest the demonstrators because of the national publicity the sit-ins were attracting. “The sit-ins are instigated and planned by and staged for the convenience of the Columbia Broadcasting System [CBS],” said Tennessee governor Buford Ellington.

  Black and white students conducting sit-ins often met with harassment and violence from angry whites.

  Nashville’s business community was pushing for a settlement. Sales had slumped because whites were afraid to come downtown and blacks were boycotting the stores where the sit-ins were taking place. By early April, an estimated ninety-eight percent of black customers were withholding their business from the stores. Merchant Bernie Schweid remembers those lean times. “The merchants were getting it from both sides, and there was very, very little traffic. One merchant … said to me, ‘You could roll a bowling ball down Church Street and not hit anybody these days.’”

  Business owners proposed a ninety-day trial period, during which they would serve blacks in a portion of the restaurant facilities formerly operated exclusively for white customers. The students refused. “The suggestion of a restricted area involves the same stigma of which we are earnestly trying to rid the community,” they wrote in a statement explaining their position. The Nashville sit-ins continued unabated.

  1960 was a presidential election year. The Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, had no real experience with civil rights issues. Many civil rights leaders viewed the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, as more of a supporter of civil rights than the unknown Kennedy. Kennedy saw, however, that President Eisenhower’s lack of moral leadership through these turbulent times was a vulnerability to be exploited in the campaign against Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president. Kennedy sought advice from one of his speech writers, Harris Wofford, who recalls the candidate saying, “You know, I’m way behind on this, because I’ve hardly known any blacks in my life. It isn’t an issue that I’ve thought about a lot … I’ve got to learn a lot, and I’ve got to catch up fast.”

  Wofford recalls, “We gave Kennedy a draft of a statement to send to the sit-in students in Atlanta and it [contained words] to the effect of, ‘They have shown that the new way for Americans to stand up for their rights is to sit down.’ And people were saying, ‘That’s much too strong. That’s really going to bother the white southerners,’ and Kennedy said, ‘Go with it.’” That statement represented one of the few times that either presidential candidate addressed a civil rights issue during the campaign.

  Other white politicians began to wonder whether the older civil rights leaders, who had been seeking change through the courts and Congress, might be losing some of their preeminent status in the movement. Blacks, too, sensed the power shift.

  “Negroes all over America knew that the spontaneous and uncorrupted student demonstrations were more than an attack on segregation,” wrote journalist Louis Lomax in Harper’s magazine. “They were proof that the Negro leadership class, epitomized by the NAACP, was no longer the prime m
over in the Negro’s social revolt. The demonstrations have shifted the desegregation battles from the courtroom to the marketplace.”

  Privately, some of the older black leaders were lukewarm to the wildcat sit-in movement. It was deflecting press attention away from their own efforts to promote civil rights legislation in Congress. But publicly, the senior leaders praised the students. “The message of this movement is plain and short,” said Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, in an April 1960 speech in Cleveland. “Negro youth is finished with racial segregation, not only as a philosophy but as a practice.” Martin Luther King, Jr., said of the student activists, “This movement is the eternal refutation of the idea that the colored citizen is satisfied with segregation.”

  The SCLC’s Ella Baker was especially impressed by the burgeoning student movement. “I think it [the movement] spread to a large extent because of the young enthusiasm and the need for action …,” she says. “There was a great deal of dissatisfaction among the young with the older leadership. Part of the [reason it] spread was a sister would call her brother at [another] college and ask, ‘Why aren’t you doing it?’”

  But Baker realized that the sit-in movement lacked direction and overall leadership. She appealed to the SCLC to sponsor a meeting of students involved in the sit-ins. The organization agreed, in part because of its desire to stamp the student movement with the SCLC mark. Held on Easter weekend, 1960, the meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, was dubbed the “Sacrifice for Dignity.”

  John Lewis and Diane Nash attended, along with northern white students such as Tom Hayden. Ella Baker had hoped to draw about a hundred students. To her amazement, three times that many showed up. “Just as the sit-ins had skyrocketed or escalated without rhyme or reason, so too the response to the concept of a conference escalated beyond our expectations,” Baker says.

  Several black ministers from the SCLC became concerned as the meeting progressed. The students were not rallying to the idea of becoming a youth arm of the SCLC or joining the youth councils of the local NAACP chapters. In fact; Baker openly advised the college students to go their own way, avoiding the older groups that had been slow to move for the last few years.

  “The ministers from the SCLC, and some others, felt sort of left out,” says Baker. “They didn’t want to lose them [the students] because this was something new, this was vitality, I suppose. What they didn’t know [was] that the young people had already decided they were going to be independent and this was difficult, of course, for someone who had been accustomed to feeling ‘these are children of my church’ … I walked out of the meeting.”

  “Ella Baker was very important in giving direction to the student movement at that particular point,” remembers Diane Nash, “[not in terms of saying] what the students ought to do, but in terms of really seeing how important it was that the students should set the goals and directions and maintain control of the student movement.”

  Jim Lawson gave a speech at the meeting. He had been expelled from Vanderbilt’s divinity school in March for advising the Nashville sit-in students to continue their protest.

  Ella Baker, a guiding force for the students, organized the Raleigh Conference that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

  “Lawson called this not a silent but a waiting generation,” said a student report on the conference. “[Lawson described us] as waiting for the cause, the moment to catapult us into speech, into actualization of our faith … The legal question is not central. There has been a failure to implement legal changes [ordered by the Supreme Court] and [segregated] customs remain unchanged. Unless we are prepared to create the climate, the law can never bring victory.”

  The meeting ended with the formation of a student-run group that would organize the sit-in effort—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, pronounced “snick.” A few months later Ella Baker wrote that the student conference made it “crystal clear that the current sit-in and other demonstrations are concerned with something bigger than a hamburger … The Negro and white students, North and South, are seeking to rid America of the scourge of racial segregation and discrimination—not only at the lunch counters but in every aspect of life.”

  Southern segregationists held a very different view of the upstart students. They saw them as a group hungry for publicity, damaging the South’s economy and disturbing its peaceful, if segregated, way of life. “Black supremacy is the goal” of the sit-ins, said Birmingham public safety commissioner Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor. He claimed that northern Democrats, the NAACP, and the “Communist front organizations” were behind the students.

  Senator Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat, accused the sit-ins of robbing the civil rights movement of its “political allure.” Russell charged that the students’ helter-skelter sit-ins and close cooperation with newspaper and television reporters revealed that “the issue [civil rights] is mostly fictitious … it has been phony all the time. It’s not really a civil rights issue but a political fight [for power in the South.]”

  The Nashville students continued their sit-ins through February and March of 1960. On April 19, Z. Alexander Looby’s home was destroyed by dynamite hurled from the window of a passing car at 5:30 A.M. The blast was so powerful that it shattered 147 windows in a building across the street. Looby, Nashville’s first black councilman, was the lawyer who had represented the arrested sit-in students. Fortunately, the explosion injured no one.

  “Mr. Z. Alexander Looby was a black attorney—conservative politically, a Lincoln Republican of many years—no one could accuse him of being a wild-eyed radical politically,” recalls Will Campbell, a white Nashville minister. “And when his house was dynamited, I think it solidified the black community and it enraged a segment of the white community in a fashion that nothing else had.”

  Nashville mayor Ben West turned his anger from the sit-in students to the perpetrators of the violence. “You all have the power to destroy this city, so let’s not have any mobs,” he said.

  On April 19, 1960, more than 2,000 demonstrators marched silently in Nashville to protest the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby’s home.

  The bombing of Looby’s house jolted the students in Nashville, by far the best organized in the nation. That same day, 2,500 students and community members staged a march on city hall—the movement’s first major protest of that kind. It was a silent march, except for the sound of shoes slapping the blacktop. Whites on the street, unaccustomed to such a show of unity by blacks, quizzically watched the orderly yet resolute marchers proceed to city hall. Mayor West was waiting on the building’s steps. Diane Nash asked West if he personally believed that it was right for blacks to be sold school supplies and cosmetics at one counter of a store but refused service at its lunch counter.

  “We needed him to say, ‘Integrate the counters,’ to tell Nashville to do what Nashville knows it should have done a long time ago—like about 95 years ago, after the Civil War,” Nash said later. Describing her televised confrontation with the mayor, she adds, “So I asked the mayor first of all: ‘Mayor West, do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?’”

  West did not hesitate. He nodded and then said yes, he believed that it was wrong.

  “They asked me some pretty soul-searching questions,” he said later. “And one that was addresssed to me as a man. And I found that I had to answer it frankly and honestly—that I did not agree that it was morally right for someone to sell them merchandise and refuse them service. And I had to answer it just exactly like that … It was a moral question—one that a man had to answer, not a politician.”

  The next morning, headlines in the Nashville Tennesseean read, “Mayor Says Integrate Counters.”

  The city’s storeowners appeared relieved by West’s words. Now they could integrate and point to the mayor as the man who was responsible. “The merchants were afraid to move on their ow
n, were almost looking for an excuse to say, ‘Well, if that’s what the mayor thinks, then maybe we ought to go ahead,’” said Nashville merchant Bernie Schweid.

  SNCC And African Liberation

  “Sure we identified with the blacks in Africa, and we were thrilled by what was going on. Here were black people, talking of freedom and liberation and independence, thousands of miles away. We could hardly miss the lesson for ourselves. They were getting their freedom, and we still didn’t have ours in what we believed was a free country. We couldn’t even get a hamburger and a Coke at the soda fountain. Maybe we were slow in realizing what this meant to us, but then things started moving together. What was happening in Africa, finally, had tremendous influence on us.”

  —John Lewis of the Student

  Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

  The following countries gained their independence in a single year—between June, 1960 and June, 1961—as the civil rights movement was gathering force.

  Zaire June 30, 1960

  Somali July 1, 1960

  Dahomey August 3, 1960

  Ivory Coast August 8, 1960

  Chad August 11, 1960

  Congo Brazzaville August 15, 1960

  Gabon August 17, 1960

  Senegal August 20, 1960

  Mali September 22, 1960

  Nigeria October 1, 1960

  Sierra Leone April 27, 1961

  The day after the march, Martin Luther King came to Nashville to celebrate with the students. King called the Nashville movement “the best organized and the most disciplined in the Southland.” He added, “I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.”

  Three weeks later, on May 10, six Nashville lunch counters—in stores that had been the prime target of the sit-ins—began serving blacks. The future still held “stand-ins” in Nashville’s segregated movie theaters, “sleep-ins” in the lobbies of the city’s hotels, and more sit-ins at hard-core segregationist restaurants. But an important and enduring victory had been won.