The Story You Haven’t Heard About John Lewis, Segregation and Nashville

The images are legendary : white men, their faces blurry with motion and rage, attempting to tear a young John Lewis off his seat in a whites-only diner in Nashville.

You may know the story from history class. Dressed in their Sunday best, Lewis and many other courageous college students staged sit-ins at segregated establishments, asking only to be served like everyone else. Withstanding threats, bullying and beatings, they exposed the inhumanity of segregation and won public sympathy for their cause. The culmination of their campaign — a famous showdown at city hall in April 1960 that ended with the mayor forcing Woolworth’s, McLellan’s and other department stores to permit integrated seating at their dinettes — went down in history.

But there’s another story you won’t find in those well-known photos, a longer, more challenging campaign Lewis fought that history books have largely overlooked.

Desegregating the five-and-dimes was a triumph. But when the dust settled, the vast majority of Nashville’s restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, swimming pools and public accommodations remained under the regime of Jim Crow. The city hall showdown was not the end — it was the beginning of a yearslong fight to desegregate the rest of Nashville.

After that initial victory, Lewis’ once-hardy band of comrades — the dozens who staged the sit-ins, the hundreds and even thousands who joined the marches and mass meetings — dwindled to a rump group. Friends graduated, left town, took up projects elsewhere or burned out. The news media stopped paying attention.

But Lewis didn’t stop. Together with a small corps of fellow activists, he kept Nashville’s civil rights movement alive — and led it to an even greater triumph.

That story has been omitted from most major civil rights narratives. Lewis barely even mentions it in his own memoir. (Ben Houston’s The Nashville Way is a notable exception.) The reason for this startling distortion of the record appears to be timing. The true Nashville breakthrough came in May 1963, at the very same moment when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s much higher-profile Birmingham campaign — in which police officers notoriously turned fire hoses and attack dogs on high school students — grabbed national headlines and cemented its key place in history.

As a result, the hundreds of cities that erupted in protest in Birmingham’s wake, even those that notched major victories, received little attention from journalists and historians. And Nashville’s 1963 breakthrough has been seen as little more than an aftershock of Birmingham.

But the truth of what happened is much more than that. This is the real story of how Lewis, together with a small band that dubbed itself the “Horrible Seven,” effectively ended segregation in Nashville.

The son of Alabama subsistence farmers, 18-year-old John Lewis arrived in Nashville in September 1958 to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Convinced at an early age of the evils of segregation, he fell in with a group of ministers called the Nashville Christian Leadership Council (a chapter of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference). One leader of the group, James Lawson, a 30-year-old divinity student, educated students in the practice of Gandhian nonviolent protest, leading to the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins.

After their victory integrating the five-and-dimes that spring, Lewis and the remaining Nashville movement turned to the city’s segregated movie theaters.

In those days, Black people had to sit in the balconies, sometimes by climbing a fire escape. In early 1961, Lewis joined a series of “stand-ins” at cinemas, where a number of activists systematically slowed down the ticket lines: One student after another would ask the ticket-sellers if they allowed interracial seating, and when told no, they’d return to the back of the line to ask again. Their protest again provoked violence from segregationist vigilantes, and they were often jailed. (Lewis was unable to present his capstone sermon his senior year because he was behind bars after one of the stand-ins.) By May, the theaters agreed to integrate — the first instance of theater desegregation in the South. Nashville’s dramatic stages, ballet and drive-ins followed suit.

Yet even after this achievement, much more work remained. In the fall of 1961, the NCLC launched a campaign called Operation Open City, targeting dining establishments again — especially fast-food franchises with names like Tic Toc and Candyland. But by now many of the leaders from 1960 were gone. Few people seemed excited about marching anymore.

One afternoon that fall, King aide Andrew Young visited the city. Crossing the Fisk University campus, he noticed scores of fraternity brothers “jumping up and down, acting foolish,” some wearing dog collars and barking — perhaps as part of some hazing ritual or prank. Then he saw “one little group of about 12 to 15 people, formally dressed, setting off in the opposite direction.” Who were they? he asked a companion. “That’s John Lewis’s group,” came the reply. “There are a couple of restaurants that still haven’t desegregated.”

It was more than a couple. And Lewis (who had enrolled for a second BA at Fisk) didn’t find his classmates’ frivolity funny. To replace his departed comrades from 1960 and 1961, he assembled a small new interracial cohort to be the core of the movement: Fred Leonard, Lester McKinnie, David Thompson and siblings Bill and Elizabeth Harbour — who were Black — and Rick Momeyer, who was white. They called themselves the “Horrible Seven.”

For months, despite little in the way of results, the Horrible Seven persisted, with the support of NCLC ministers. Besides the sit-ins and stand-ins, they were now waging “sleep-ins” (at hotels), “kneel-ins” (at white churches) and “drop-ins.” (Black women seeking service at a segregated establishment.) White people continued to harass them. One waitress poured scalding hot water on them. Another time, a grill manager locked Fred Leonard inside the store.

Only after another year, in early 1963, did things again change. On Jan. 19, Lewis led the first big sit-in of the new term, at the YMCA. He and others were arrested. This time, however, they were charged not with the usual misdemeanor of trespassing but instead with “conspiracy to obstruct trade and business,” a crime that carried severe penalties — in Lewis’s case, 90 days in the workhouse and a $50 fine.

The harsh verdicts drew headlines, fueled outrage and spurred the students and ministers to redouble their energies. With renewed purpose, they enlisted political and business leaders, newspaper publishers and other clergy in the campaign. Hundreds of people turned out for mass meetings and marches. At one of Lewis’ trials, also on conspiracy charges, the sheer size of the 500-person audience seemed to persuade the judge to throw out the charges.

The hostile mobs returned, too, picking fights, throwing rocks, following the protesters back to their headquarters at the First Baptist Church. Suddenly it felt like 1960 once more; the spirit of mass resistance had returned. “The city of Nashville is on the move again,” Lewis wrote in a private letter to Momeyer. “The community is coming together once more to destroy the system of segregation.”

The conspiracy verdicts weren’t the only development that drove participation in the Nashville movement. Events unfolding 180 miles to the south, in Birmingham, also made a major impact.

On April 12, Good Friday, Alabama officials sent King to solitary confinement for violating an injunction. That led the Nashville ministers to hold a vigil on the courthouse steps. As Birmingham inspired Nashville, so Nashville inspired Birmingham: In Alabama, Andy Young reminded activists that in April 1960, 4,000 Nashvillians had marched on city hall after a white supremacist firebombed the home of Alexander Looby, a Black lawyer who represented the NCLC. That march had led to their first breakthrough — and Young called on Birminghamians to learn from it. James Bevel, now also working for SCLC, screened an NBC documentary about the Nashville sit-ins for his Birmingham recruits, to show them how it was done.

In both cities, movement leaders controversially enlisted high school and middle school students to bolster their ranks. In Birmingham, James Bevel had to convince a reluctant King to go along with a “children’s crusade.” King objected for good reason: He was loath to subject minors to lethal violence, and it remained uncertain that juveniles could hew rigorously to nonviolent doctrines. In Nashville, as the movement leaders considered and debated similar tactics, Lewis also voiced doubts. He told Vencen Horsley, a fellow Nashville activist, that the new recruits looked as if they belonged in day care. “They’re coming anyway,” Horsley said. “There’s no way we can prevent that. The only thing we can do is to teach them to be nonviolent.”

In early May, the Birmingham confrontation famously produced a stunning victory: The city, a bastion of white supremacy, promised to desegregate its public accommodations and to stop discriminating against Black people in local hiring.

That accord resounded in Nashville, too. Lewis avidly clipped newspaper articles about the Birmingham campaign, pasting them onto posterboard and tacking them to trees on the Fisk campus. By Tuesday, May 7, Nashville was also ready to act. The ranks of protesters had been growing steadily since March, with high school students now eagerly joining in. James Lawson — who had left the city to work with King — returned to headline a mass meeting in which he urged everyone to attend what would become a monster rally the next day.

People heeded the call. The morning of May 8, nearly 1,000 people packed the First Baptist Church for a rally. They then descended on the city’s stores and restaurants for a wave of sit-ins.

The Nashvillians returned to the stores again on Thursday and Friday. Each day they were hassled and manhandled. A group of white people threw bottles and rocks. Although most of the civil rights protesters remained peaceful — singing, picketing, sitting in — a few responded in kind. That was all the Banner , Nashville’s conservative newspaper, needed to run a story headlined, “Negroes Attack Police Here.” But even the more liberal Tennessean conceded that “some of the Negroes returned the fire.”

After three days of escalating conflict, Beverly Briley, the new mayor, intervened. On Friday night, he met for three hours with Lewis and two of the movement’s top ministers. By the end, Briley largely gave in to their demands. He announced that he would begin negotiating the total desegregation of Nashville’s restaurants, hotels and businesses. In return, Lewis and the ministers agreed to a two-day moratorium on assemblies.

The weekend was quiet as the parties talked. But things moved slowly. To keep up the pressure, Lewis declared on Sunday that marches would resume the next day “unless some concrete steps are taken to end segregation here. … We want something besides progress reports from committees.”

On Monday, May 13, with the moratorium over and progress wanting, Lewis led a new march of 250 people downtown. White vigilantes resumed their rock throwing. This time, however, many more Black youths retaliated. One “pitched battle,” according to the Tennessean , lasted 90 minutes, as “bands of youths and adults of both races roamed the streets at times uncontrolled.” At one point several Black marchers pulled two white hecklers from the crowd and beat them on the pavement. Six people were arrested.

Lewis was realizing how unrealistic his expectation of strict adherence to nonviolence could be. Still, he and the NCLC ministers roundly condemned the misbehavior on their side and reiterated their principles, beseeching their followers to refuse fights. In the streets, the peaceful marchers impressed their views on reporters. “We don’t want any of you who just want to fight,” one Black student exclaimed to “an intoxicated Negro who brandished a knife,” the Tennessean reported. Others sang “We Shall Overcome” and “America the Beautiful.”

Monday night the mood grew ominous. At around 11 p.m., a vigilante hurled a rock from a car — thought at first to be a shotgun blast, evoking memories of the Looby bombing — while driving past the house of a Black minister. It knocked out a window and nearly hit the minister’s wife. Nashville seemed poised to explode as Birmingham had. A Chamber of Commerce executive who was leading the negotiations for the businesses threatened to end the talks, citing “flagrant and unwarranted riots.” Lewis, determined to quell the violence, vowed to reporters that resumed progress in the negotiations would obviate any need for more street actions.

On Tuesday, the negotiating committee met in Briley’s office for two hours. Lewis spoke again to reporters, now exuding even more optimism. “There are definite signs we are moving into the beloved community. In order to show our faith, to purge ourselves of our sins, we have called off the demonstrations for the night,” he said. “For three years we have been fighting. … Now we are in an area of real progress. The mayor is doing as much as any mayor in the South can do.”

Briley followed through by creating a new body, named the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission, tasked with charting a course toward desegregation and equal-opportunity hiring. Auspiciously, he appointed five members of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council. “I think that the downtown businesses not integrated will do so,” Briley predicted. “There are signs of real progress,” Lewis agreed.

Briley’s timing was shrewd. On Saturday, May 18, John F. Kennedy flew to Nashville to mark the 30th anniversary of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the 90th anniversary of Vanderbilt University. In his remarks, the president praised the city’s recent steps toward desegregation, calling for a society in which “all Americans enjoy equal opportunity and liberty under law.” Observers labeled it the strongest call for racial equality that any president had ever delivered below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Victory came on June 11. The Human Relations Commission announced that the city’s restaurants, hotels and motels would now serve Black patrons alongside white people. A few establishments continued to discriminate, and Black people still faced prejudice and discrimination in employment and housing. But most of Nashville’s businesses acted with dispatch.

Lewis proclaimed the agreement “a great victory for the nonviolent movement.” That fall, Jet magazine named Nashville the “Best City in the South for Negroes,” describing it as “the city with the most comprehensive and diverse integration achievements.” The Tennessean likewise pronounced in September that progress “can be seen everywhere … at a movie on the weekend, on a shopping trip during the week, even during a hospital visit.”

Lewis had reason to be proud. Of all the students who’d been there at the start, he had fought segregation most unrelentingly, persevering even during the gray and quiet winters, even when his comrades were few. He had rebuilt the movement after it had fallen into a rut and completed the desegregation push he’d begun in 1960. He now deemed the triumph of 1963 a validation of his nonviolent approach.

A few friends questioned his logic. Dave Kotelchuck, a white Vanderbilt physics professor who often picketed with Lewis, told him that without the street brawling and the looming threat of wide-scale violence, the spring marches might not have worked. “John,” Kotelchuck said, “you say that this shows that nonviolence works. But you’ve demonstrated that the fear of violence is effective in making change. When you have mass demonstrations with violence as possible, things will happen. That’s not the success of nonviolence.”

Lewis was unpersuaded. He insisted that the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the marches had made the key difference. “It is this reality of purpose,” he declared, that “I believe our young people need in order to rededicate their lives and their sacred honor. Our aim is to desegregate all public places in Nashville. That will enable us to move from desegregation to integration. Through disciplined action, we can transform this community.”