SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Howard Boone's Zinn
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for myself, then who is for me? If I am for myself alone, then what am I? If not now, when?” He became a leader of the local sit-in movement.
To these young people, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 was a childhood memory. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the first mass action by Southern Negroes, though also dimly remembered, was an inspiration. The trouble at Little Rock in 1957 was more vivid, with the unforgettable photos of the young Negro girl walking past screaming crowds towards Central High School. The Greensboro sit-ins struck a special chord of repressed emotion, and excitement raced across the Negro college campuses of the South.
Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Ruby Doris Smith, Chuck McDew: all were to become stalwarts in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And for so many others in SNCC, the Greensboro sit-in—more than the Supreme Court decision, more than the Little Rock crisis, more than the Montgomery bus boycott, more than the recent declarations of independence by a host of African nations, and yet, perhaps, owing its galvanic force to the accumulation of all these events—was a turning point in their lives. James Forman, studying French in graduate school in the North, began turning his thoughts southward. Exactly what was going on in the minds of so many other students, soon to leave school for “The Movement,” remains unknown.
Out of the Nashville, Tennessee, sit-ins, a battalion of future SNCC people took shape. Tall, quiet, Marion Barry, a graduate student in chemistry at Fisk University, who would later become the first chairman of SNCC, took a leading part in the Nashville sit-ins from the beginning. His father, a Mississippi farmer, migrated to Memphis, Tennessee, and Barry went to school there. As an undergraduate at LeMoyne College in Memphis, he publicly protested an anti-Negro remark made by a prominent white trustee of the college, created an uproar in the city, and barely avoided being expelled.
I came to Fisk… inquired about forming a college chapter of the NAACP…. But we didn’t do much.… We had not at any time thought of direct action…. In the meantime in Greensboro, N.C., the student movement began February 1, 1960. So we in Nashville decided we wanted to do something about it…. I remember the first time I was arrested, about February 27.… I took a chance on losing a scholarship or not receiving my Master’s degree. But to me, if I had received my scholarship and Master’s degree, and still was not a free man, I was not a man at all.
John Lewis, short, fiery, from a small town in Alabama, was also in Nashville as a seminary student when the sit-ins began. He immediately became involved and went to jail four times. “My mother wrote me a letter and said ‘Get out of the movement,’ but I couldn’t.… I wrote her and said, ‘I have acted according to my convictions and according to my Christian conscience…. My soul will not be satisfied until freedom, justice, and fair play become a reality for all people.’” Lewis later followed Marion Barry and Chuck McDew to become Chairman of SNCC.
“Do show yourself friendly on the counter at all times. Do sit straight and always face the counter. Don’t strike back, or curse back if attacked. Don’t laugh out. Don’t hold conversations. Don’t block entrances.” These were the instructions to sit-in demonstrators in Nashville. They demanded a careful balance of quiet non-resistance and a determined militancy, and perhaps no one better expressed this than Diane Nash, a tiny, slender, campus beauty queen at Fisk, one of the pillars of the Nashville student movement and later a founder of SNCC. When students were being cross-examined at the trials that followed the Nashville demonstrations, one of the standard questions was: “Do you know Diane Nash?” Friendship with her was apparently full of perils.
Twelve days after the Greensboro incident, forty students sat in at Woolworth’s in Nashville. There was at first some discussion about whether the white exchange students should go along, but finally the prevailing opinion was in favor. Candie Anderson recalls:
That first sit-in was easy.… It was a Thursday afternoon and it was snowing. There were not many people downtown. Store personnel ran around nervously.… My friends were determined to be courteous and well-behaved.… Most of them read or studied while they sat at the counters, for three or four hours. I heard them remind each other not to leave cigarette ashes on the counter, to take off their hats, etc.… When the sit-in was over we all met in church. There must have been five hundred kids there, and we all sang together.…
By the fourth sit-in, tension was mounting rapidly. There was violence that day. Lighted cigarettes were pushed against the backs of girls sitting at the counter. A white sit-inner, on a stool beside a Negro girl, became a special object of attention by the crowd nearby. Someone kept calling him a “nigger-lover.” When he didn’t respond he was pulled off the stool, thrown to the floor, and kicked. At McClellan’s variety store, a white man kept blowing cigar smoke into the face of a Negro sitting at the counter, a Fisk University student named Paul LePrad, who made no move. This infuriated the man. He pulled the student from his stool and hit him. LePrad got back on the stool. He was pulled off again and hit. The police came and arrested LePrad and the seventeen students sitting in with him.
The group at Woolworth’s, where Candie Anderson was, heard about this incident. They decided to go to McClellan’s to protest.
There was a rope around the stools, showing that the counter was closed. We climbed over the rope. A policeman stood there and said quite clearly, “Do not sit down,” and we sat down. … I became suddenly aware of the crowd of people standing behind us.… Young kids threw french fried potatoes at us, and gum, and cigarette butts. I looked down the counter at Barbara Crosby in a straight pink skirt and nice white blouse, and at Stephen in a dark suit, with a calculus book…. The policemen simply lined up behind us and peeled us two by two off the stools.… The crowd in the store … shouted out approval. They said about Barbara and me.… Oh, white … WHITE, WHITE, WHITE! Three paddy wagons were blinking at us from the street. Once more we had to walk through those crowds. Someone spit right in front of me…. The TV cameras took lots of pictures and we drove off to the Nashville city jail.
With seventy-six students in jail, a group of NAACP people in Nashville met the next day and pledged support. Fisk University President Stephen Wright said: “Students have been exposed all their lives to the teachings of the great American scriptures of democracy, freedom, and equality, and no literate person should be surprised that they reflect these teachings in their conduct.”
But at white Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where a thirty-one-year-old Negro named James Lawson was enrolled in the Divinity School, it was different. Lawson, a conscientious objector and a pacifist, believed in nonviolent resistance. When the first mass arrests took place, newspapermen quoted him as saying he would advise students to violate the law. The Nashville Banner immediately called this “incitation to anarchy” and added: “There is no place in Nashville for flannel-mouthed agitators, white or colored—under whatever sponsorship, imported for preachment of mass disorder; self-supported vagrants, or paid agents of strife-breeding organizations.” The Vanderbilt trustees, one of whom was the publisher of the Nashville Banner, another of whom was president of one of the large department stores where sit-ins had taken place, voted the next day to give Lawson the choice of withdrawing from the movement or dismissal from the University.
Charging the press with distorting his statements, Lawson refused to leave the movement, and in early March he was expelled, three months before his scheduled graduation. Most of the sixteen faculty members of the divinity school, all white, protested. By May, eleven of them, as well as Dean J. Robert Nelson, had resigned over the refusal of the school to re-admit Lawson, leaving four persons on the divinity school faculty. The Richmond News Leader commented: “Good riddance … Vanderbilt University will be better off….”
The Nashville sit-ins continued, with arrests, trials, and students deciding to stay in jail in protest rather than pay fines or put up bond. Chief defense lawyer for the students was sixty-two-year-old Z. Alexander Looby, a distinguished Negro attorney, born in Trinidad, and a member of the Nashville City Council.
On April 19, at five o’clock in the morning, while Looby and his wife were asleep in the backroom of their home, one block away from Fisk University’s campus, a bomb exploded on his porch. In her dormitory room, Candie Anderson was awakened by the noise. “Only one time in my life have I heard a sound worse