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There's never enough time for Nashville's best-known
civil rights figures to talk about all the ugly and beautiful
things they saw in their fight for racial equality. Their stories
pour out quickly, edited down after years of retelling.
But on Thursday, they spoke with larger-than-life pictures
projected alongside them — revealing the little details they
couldn't — and sometimes slipped easily into old familiar
roles.
On the big screen, Diane Nash stares ahead grimly, wearing an
immaculate suit and carrying an armload of papers as she leads
scores of men toward a confrontation with the mayor.
The Rev. James Lawson sits placidly on a lush lawn, circled by
enchanted college students, explaining Gandhi's philosophy of
nonviolence.
A poker-faced Ernest "Rip" Patton Jr. looks into the
camera, a small placard reading "Police Dept. Jackson,
Miss." hanging around his neck.
The determined leader. The spiritual guide. The foot
soldier.
The three spoke at Waller law firm's Martin Luther King Jr.
Day luncheon on a panel moderated by John L. Seigenthaler, chairman
emeritus of The Tennessean and himself a civil rights activist.
About 600 people attended the event, in its third year, held at the
Doubletree hotel.
Mayor Karl Dean opened the luncheon with more information about
a statue honoring Nashville's civil rights leaders, to be
installed on the Avenue of the Arts — Fifth Avenue near the
entrance to the Arcade. The city has whittled down proposals and is
inviting the finalists for a site visit in March.
The spot for the statue is where college students protested
against the city's segregated lunch counters in the 1960s.
"Thank you for making Nashville a leader in the civil
rights movement," Dean told the panelists. "I don't
know how long change would have taken if you hadn't
acted."
Fate brought the group together here, they said, to play the
roles they ultimately embraced.
Lawson was a student in Vanderbilt University's divinity
school, already committed to King's goal of changing the Jim
Crow South. He recruited Patton, a Nashville native; Nash, who
moved here from Chicago to attend Fisk University; and more than 30
other people to begin desegregating the city's downtown.
Lawson trained them how to sit at the segregated lunch counters
and endure taunts and physical violence.
As he recounted that process, his audience saw another picture
— a white man dumping a drink on top of an African-American
woman's head.
"We diminish our lives by being afraid to face
crisis," Lawson told the crowd. "We discover dimensions
of life that we never imagined when we're prepared to engage in
the struggle of living and face the uncomfortable
choices."
Nashville and the rest of the South were ready to do just that,
Nash said.
"I would go back to Chicago during the summers and think
about some of the things I'd done in the South and think,
'That was dangerous,' " she said. "The movement
had a way of bringing things out of me I didn't know were
there, such as courage.
"Segregation was so humiliating. At that time, black people
across the South had had it up to here and were willing to go to
great lengths to end it."
Female leaders in the civil rights movement were rare, but Nash
became chairwoman of the one in Nashville after two elected male
leaders skipped meetings and protests because — they told the
group later — they were studying.
Nash said her success came from loving both her attackers and
her fellow protesters, even being willing to jump between the two
when things got violent.
She's perhaps most famous for a 1960 confrontation with
Mayor Ben West on the courthouse steps. After West explained how he
supported desegregation, she asked a simple question: "Mayor,
do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?"
"Yes," he said.
Three weeks later, they were, making Nashville the first
Southern city to take that step.
The group battled on in other states.
Patton recalled his time in Mississippi's Parchman Prison
Farm with other Freedom Riders, who took bus rides through the
South with messages of integration.
Guards put laxatives in the food and then shut off the water to
sinks and toilets, Patton said. It was the worst thing he
remembered.
But even then, the Freedom Riders woke up singing. And to make
the point, he led Thursday's audience in song: "Woke up
this morning with my mind stayed on freedom."
The original word was "Jesus," not freedom, he
explained. But for Patton, who carried his Bible to the stage, the
two are inextricably linked.
Originally published in The Tennessean, January 2013.
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