The nashville civil rights movement a study of the phenomenon of

Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University History Dissertations Department of History 4-9-2010 The Nashville Civil Rights Movement: A Study of the Phenomenon of Intentional Leadership Development and its Consequences for Local Movements and the National Civil Rights Movement Barry Everett Lee Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/history_diss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Lee, Barry Everett, "The Nashville Civil Rights Movement: A Study of the Phenomenon of Intentional Leadership Development and its Consequences for Local Movements and the National Civil Rights Movement." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2010. doi: https://doi.57709/1350732 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact scholarworks@gsu.

THE NASHVILLE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: A STUDY OF THE PHENOMENON OF INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR LOCAL MOVEMENTS AND THE NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AT GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY by BARRY EVERETT LEE Under the Direction of Jacqueline A. Rouse ABSTRACT The Nashville Civil Rights Movement was one of the most dynamic local movements of the early 1960s, producing the most capable student leaders of the period 1960 to 1965. Despite such a feat, the historical record has largely overlooked this phenomenon. What circumstances allowed Nashville to produce such a dynamic movement whose youth leadership of John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard LaFayette, and James Bevel had no parallel? How was this small cadre able to influence movement developments on local and a national level? In order to address these critical research questions, standard historical methods of inquiry will be employed.

These include the use of secondary sources, primarily Civil Rights Movement histories and memoirs, scholarly articles, and dissertations and theses. The primary sources used include public lectures, articles from various periodicals, extant interviews, numerous manuscript collections, and a variety of audio and video recordings. No original interviews were conducted because of the availability of extensive high quality interviews. This dissertation will demonstrate that the Nashville Movement evolved out of the formation of independent Black churches and college that over time became the primary sites of resistance to racial discrimination, starting in the Nineteenth Century.

By the late 1950s, Nashville’s Black college attracted the students who became the driving force of a local movement that quickly established itself at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. Nashville’s forefront status was due to an intentional leadership training program based upon nonviolence. As a result of the training, leaders had a profound impact upon nearly every major movement development up to 1965, including the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the birth of SNCC, the emergence of Black Power, the direction of the SCLC after 1962, the thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma voting rights campaign.

In addition, the Nashville activists helped eliminate fear as an obstacle to Black freedom. These activists also revealed new relationship dynamics between students and adults and merged nonviolent direct action with voter registration, a combination considered incompatible. INDEX WORDS: Albany Movement, Bernard LaFayette, Birmingham campaign of 1963, Black Power, C. Vivian, Diane Nash, Freedom Rides, James Bevel, James M., John Lewis, Kelly Miller Smith, Nashville Civil Rights Movement, Nashville Student Movement, Nonviolence, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Sit-ins, Selma voting rights campaign of 1965.

THE NASHVILLE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: A STUDY OF THE PHENOMENON OF INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR LOCAL MOVEMENTS AND THE NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT by BARRY EVERETT LEE A Dissertation in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2010 Copyright by Barry Everett Lee 2010 THE NASHVILLE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: A STUDY OF THE PHENOMENON OF INTENTIONAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR LOCAL MOVEMENTS AND THE NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AT GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY by BARRY EVERETT LEE Committee Chair: Jacqueline A. Rouse Committee: Clifford Kuhn Vicki Crawford Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Numerous individuals assisted me in arriving at this stage of my formal education. My paternal grandparents, J. and Hattie Kincaid Lee, established a legacy of higher education in my family.

Their purchase of farmland in Mississippi made a college education possible for my father, the late Daniel Moore Lee, who in concert with my mother Marie Roberts Lee, insisted that my siblings and I also go to college. At Morehouse College, I had the good fortune of guidance from an outstanding faculty of history professors who shaped my development as a professional historian. I am eternally indebted to Drs. Marcellus Barksdale, Alton Hornsby, Jr., Daniel Klenbort, Giles Conwill, Joseph Windham, and Jacqueline A.

I am indebted to Dr. Barksdale for initially peaking my interest in history when I took his History 112 class. Klenbort has my eternal gratitude for pushing me to take the comprehensive exams which then seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. It is to Dr.

Rouse that I am especially indebted. She introduced me to the wonders of African American History and the challenge of honoring the contributions of Black women to this history. Additionally, she stands as the only one who had a hand in all three of my degrees: the bachelors, masters, and doctorate. I also owe a great deal of thanks to her for her masterful supervision of the entire dissertation process.

One could not have had a better committee chair. In addition, I was very fortunate to have the counsel of Drs. Vicki Crawford and Clifford Kuhn on my dissertation committee. Their advice and expertise proved invaluable.

Faithfully standing by me as I made this educational journey that at times seemed as though it would never end has been my soul mate and wife of twenty-two years, Jeannie Hisbon- Lee. She too has been with me through three degrees and her patience and support have been my bedrock over those years. In many ways, this degree is as much hers as it is mine. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 SETTING THE STAGE: FROM SLAVERY TO ALMOST FREEDOM 12 3 THE “MISFITS” COME TO TOWN: THE CONVERGENCE OF KEY ACTIVISTS UPON NASHVILLE IN THE 1950S 50 4 JAMES M., AND THE DISCIPLES OF NONVIOLENCE: THE NASHVILLE LEADERSHIP TRAINING MODEL 114 5 “WE WERE WARRIORS”: THE SIT-INS, NASHVILLE STYLE 169 6 “WHAT FREEDOM WILL DEMAND”: THE NASHVILLE STUDENT MOVEMENT AND THE FREEDOM RIDES 229 7 A “BEVELUTION”: THE INFLUENCE OF NASHVILLE ACTIVISTS ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, 1963 TO 1965 303 8 CONCLUSION: THE LEGACIES OF NASHVILLE: POST-MOVEMENT LIVES, HISTORICAL AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE, THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS, AND THE NEED FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 355 8.1 Post-Movement Lives 355 8.5 The Need for Future Research 383 9 BIBLIOGRAPHY 387 v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In my view, revisionist history can be akin to a major physical examination that leads to corrective surgery.

The patient may be reasonably healthy, but may have some minor problems because of a steady diet of dated Martin Luther King, Selma, Birmingham, and Mississippi sandwiches. They are all good eats, but feasting on too many sandwiches everyday is not a balanced diet. And what the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement needs is more balance. To be sure, great strides have been made in terms of the literature published over the last fifteen to twenty years.

Many more African American and female scholars have published superb anthologies and monographs about this era. We have also seen a record of scholarship less focused on the “great men” of the movement, resulting in landmark work by Aldon Morris, Charles Payne, and John Dittmer and others who shifted our gaze toward more community-based activism. This dissertation is partly a product of the trend inaugurated by Morris’ classic Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, one of the first pieces of scholarship to expose the significance of the Nashville Movement as an important “movement center” and as a place where the phenomenon of nonviolence-based intentional leadership development emerged. Using Nashville as one example, Morris revealed the significance of the movement’s origins, planning, decision-making, and execution at the local level, all accentuated by relationships between Black ministers and resources provided by local churches and other social institutions.

Almost overnight, our scholarly gaze shifted from a top-down, nationally-driven interpretation of the Movement to one local in nature. This dissertation is not a traditional study of a local civil rights movement. While my interest in Nashville is partly inspired by the work of Aldon Morris, Charles Payne, and John 1 Dittmer, scholars whose edifying work has taken a bottom-up approach to the analysis of the Civil Rights Movement, the centrality of Nashville here functions as a window into something larger and more profound than what any one local community or any particular group of activists can provide. Rather, the research presented here is a hybrid of two historiographical traditions, one encompassing a longstanding emphasis on Movement history as a national phenomenon and the other a more recent emphasis on the local nature of the Movement.

In my estimation, the recent emphasis on local movement histories has obscured something equally as important: the connective tissue between local and national movements. They are not separate and apart, but interconnected, codependent, and intertwined. The research demonstrated here concerning Nashville makes this phenomenon apparent and significant. In addition to the need to reconnect local movements with the national movement, there is another glaring gap that must be filled.

Astonishingly, there has been no major scholarship produced on the Nashville Movement. Except for John Lewis’ seminal memoir Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement and the account written by the now deceased journalist David Halberstam, The Children, the historical record on Nashville’s role in the Movement is scant. The only other published monograph related to the Nashville Movement is Lisa Mullins’ biography Diane Nash: The Fire of the Movement (2005), a more descriptive than analytical volume. The number of dissertations and theses are also few.

One of the first pieces of scholarship on the Nashville Movement was a master’s thesis written by Sandra A. Taylor of Fisk University in 1973, entitled, “The Nashville Sit-In Movement. Sumner completed a dissertation at the University of Tennessee entitled “The Local Press and the Nashville Student Movement, 1960.” More recently in 1991, Leila Meier, a Vanderbilt University master’s degree candidate wrote, “A Different Kind of Prophet: The Role of Kelly 2 Miller Smith in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1960.” Other than these, scholars interested the Nashville Movement have few sources to which they can turn. And at the writing of this introduction, no one has yet published any scholarly biographies on the stalwarts of the Nashville Movement: Kelly Miller Smith, James M., John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and Bernard LaFayette.

By no means will the numerous gaps be entirely filled here. In fact, this research does not represent a full analysis of the Nashville Movement as a local development. Instead, what is intended here is an examination of the following: what made Nashville such a potent force in the early phases of the Movement; why and how its student leadership became so prominent not only in Nashville but in the larger Movement in general; and how Nashville leaders affected the development of Movement trends, particularly the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the emergence of SNCC and its character, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, the evolution of the SCLC as a credible civil rights organization, and the Selma voting rights initiative. Obviously, the research here takes a broad rather than a narrow focus simply because the breadth and depth of the influence of Nashville and its primary activists cannot be otherwise explored.

The unique contribution of Nashville is that no other movement city can boast of such a outstanding corps of leadership, including Atlanta, Little Rock, Jackson, Montgomery, and Birmingham.