User:Mitchumch/Tennessee in the Civil Rights Movement

Part 1
African Americans in Tennessee

Nashville and Memphis played central roles in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957, Nashville public schools began to be desegregated using the "stair-step" plan as proposed by Dan May; people protested integration and, at Hattie Cotton Elementary School, a bomb was detonated. No one was killed, and after that the desegregation plan went on without violence. On February 13, 1960, hundreds of college students involved in the Nashville Student Movement launched a sit-in campaign to desegregate lunch counters throughout the city. Although initially met with violence and arrests, the protesters were eventually successful in pressuring local businesses to end the practice of racial segregation. Many of the activists involved in the Nashville sit-ins—including James Bevel, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis and others—went on to organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which emerged as one of the most influential organizations of the civil rights movement. The first movement credited to SNCC was the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, directed and strategized by James Bevel, which desegregated the city's theaters. Nashville also became a launching site for Freedom Riders in 1961 after the original riders from Washington, D.C., were stopped in Birmingham, Alabama.

A sanitation workers' strike in Memphis in 1968 was linked to both the Civil Rights Movement and the Poor People's Campaign. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had come to the city in support of the striking workers, was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel, the day after giving his prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech at the Mason Temple. The assassin, James Earl Ray, was a racist escaped convict who had no previous connection to the city.

Part 2
History of Tennessee

Tennessee played an important and prominent role during the Civil Rights Movement. Many national civil rights leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received training in methods of nonviolent protest at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The methods which Gandhi had used were taught here.

In the spring of 1960, after decades of segregation, Tennessee's Jim Crow laws were challenged by an organized group of Nashville college students from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Vanderbilt University. The students, led by Jim Farmer, John Lewis, and ministers of local African-American churches, used methods of non-violent protest in anticipation of a planned and concerted effort to desegregate Nashville's downtown lunch counters through a series of sit-ins. Although many were harassed and beaten by white vigilantes and arrested by the Nashville police, none of the students retaliated with violence.

The Nashville sit-ins reached a turning point when the house of Z. Alexander Looby, a prominent African-American attorney and leader, was bombed. Although no one was killed, thousands of protesters spontaneously marched to Nashville City Hall to confront Mayor Ben West. The mayor had offered only weak half-measures and vacillated toward segregation. Meeting the mass of protesters outside city hall, West informally debated with them and concluded by conceding that segregation was immoral. The bombing, the march, and Mayor West's statement helped convince downtown lunch counters to desegregate. Although segregation and Jim Crow were by no means over, the episode served as one of the first successful events of nonviolent protest, and as a significant example to the rest of the nation.

The leadership, activism and moral arguments of African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement across the South gained passage of the national Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. African Americans regained ordinary civil rights and the power to exercise their voting rights. Voting rights for all were protected by provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

In contrast to the successes of the movement in Tennessee, the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis was perceived as symbolic of hatred in the state. King was in the city to support a strike by black sanitary public works employees of AFSCME Local 1733. The city quickly settled the strike on favorable terms to the employees. Riots and civil unrest erupted in African-American areas in numerous cities across the country, resulting in widespread injuries and millions of dollars in property damages.