Interview: Rev. James Lawson

On Gandhi's influence:

Yes, in one way I was kind of weaned on Gandhi because the — what was called back then the Negro press admired Gandhi a great deal and had lots of stuff about Gandhi from time to time. And our home always had a Cleveland Call-In Post or a Pittsburgh Courier in the house all the time.

And, so, that's when I first began to really come to know about Mahatma Gandhi. And when I hit college, I started reading his books, I started reading his The Story of My Experiments With Truth, which is the autobiography. I read a number of other books, some of his speeches, some of the campaign.

So, I had read fairly widely, I suspect, by the time I got to India in 1953 and knew a lot of my own questions by that time. So, you know, [I] counted Gandhi as one of my mentors, my intellectual and spiritual mentor.

On his trip to India:

Well, the trip generally, of course, simply strengthened my own resolution and my own understanding. I picked up nuances in India that I couldn't have picked up anywhere else. For example, I was very surprised that when I talked about Gandhi and some of his life and work with Indian Christians, I got a kind of damper on my enthusiasm.

And I would get stuff like, well, you know, he was a Hindu, as though I wouldn't know that. Or I got stuff about — that he really wasn't the best figure in terms of understanding Christianity, which I think was wrong, but there was that kind of critique of Gandhi rather than a sort of recognizing this is a fellow spiritual sojourner, though he called himself a Hindu.

They didn't know his Christian roots even, the fact that — the way he had seen the New Testament. But fortunately I did meet then some of the Christians, who were members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in India and I met some of the folk who consider themselves disciples of Gandhi in the Christian church, especially from the South.

And, so, I realized — and, of course, they helped me to understand — that some Christians who were more culturally imperialistic tended to see Gandhi as a rival and, therefore, not good for Christian missions. So, that was one of the kind of nuances that I realized was there.

I was there in '53, so this is only five years after his death, but already by that time, Gandhi, as a movement had scattered in various ways. Yes, on the one side, Prime Minister Nehru saw himself in the Gandhi school in so many different ways and trying heroically to apply it to the development of a democratic society, but other elements of the Gandhian movement had dissipated — they were working on different things and in different places. There was no overarching unity.

But as I continue to read and look at the situation, however, I recognize that there wasn't an overarching unity during his lifetime. He did not try to provide an overall structure for things. He worked in a kind of parallel path with the Congress party and the Congress party was more the center of unity than Gandhi's philosophy and organizations.

On his decision to work in the South:

[Several years earlier] Howard Thurmond, Mordechai Johnson, Edward Carroll, who later became a bishop in my denomination, who I'd met and known for some time, in fact, were three of the people who toured India, under the auspices of the YMCA, as I recall. They went to a YMCA conference and they stayed to tour India. So, they're the ones who had the visit with Gandhi. So, I was well-acquainted with that story by that time. And I also wrestled with the fact that... Gandhi had said that perhaps the Negro people could lift non-violence up for the world to see in a way that he could not.

And I've thought about that. By '53, I had decided — I'd already done some things in racial justice issues, done some sitting-in, experimenting with trying to open up places, lunch counters and what not for people, but I'd always also always pondered that. And by '53, I decided that one of the places where I would work one day was in the South; and, quite specifically, as a kind of mission field for non-violence, as a kind of way of trying to apply — and I didn't say it in that way then. I saw it more as the application of the Christian gospel to the practical issues. It's much more the way I would have put it back then. And so I was very aware of it. And in a real way that made Martin King's emergence in '55 all the more for me exhilarating.

On Martin Luther King's influence:

[While living in India] I subscribed [to] the Nagpur Times, which was an English newspaper, English language newspaper. And, so, the — this was not December the 1st. It was a couple of days after that, maybe as far away as the 5th or 6th or 7th. The incident with Rosa Parks took place on the first — the first day of the boycott was the 5th and, so, it was somewhere shortly after the 5th that the news that was on the front page, in the middle of the page of the Nagpur Times that — I don't remember exactly the headlines, but [something like] "Bus Boycott, Negroes Use Non-Violence in United States." And I read the story. It was about the bus boycott in Montgomery and Martin Luther King, Jr. was mentioned. So that was — that was in '55 that that took place.

So, that's when I first learned his name. And then, of course, I would see it from time to time in '55 and '56 — was impressed when I traveled around Africa in '56 that people in Africa knew his name. And sometimes [I] had a picture from a magazine of Martin King that made a big impression on me in '56. Then I met him for the first time in Oberlin in '57, something like February the 6th.

He was in Oberlin for a day of speaking and his first address was a big convocation in the chapel at Oberlin. And I think that was maybe 11 o'clock, something like that. So, I, of course, went to hear that, and the campus director of the YMCA at that time was Harvey Cox, who is now a professor of religion at Harvard University. And Harvey and I had become good friends by this time.

So, he wanted to make certain that he would invite me to special things that he was sponsoring and he made certain that I knew about King's coming and then made certain also I knew that after the assembly there would be a gathering in one of the private dining rooms in a dormitory in some place in Oberlin, that I should come to that and have a continuing visit with King.

So, it turned out that Martin King and I got there about the same time. He was traveling alone. So, we sat, as I recall, it was a round table in one of the two small dining rooms and we were by ourselves for a number of minutes. And I introduced myself and told him about myself and said that I planned to come south to work in the movement one day. And he said something like "Come now. Don't wait. We don't have anyone like you in the South."

Well, he meant the fact that I — by this time, '57 — I had had what, maybe ten, eleven years of study of non-violence, experimenting with non-violence, that I had come into non-violence from the point of view of Jesus and the Christian church and New Testament and Biblical understanding. That I had taught it. I, therefore, had practical experience. I had been in prison for 14 months by that time as a protester of war. So he knew that from our brief exchange of my story — he knew that he didn't have a black clergy person who had that kind of background. That was basically it. So I understood that.

He just said, come now. Because — and as far as I remember, other people began to come in, so we couldn't continue the conversation, but that was the gist of the conversation as I recall it. My plan out of that conversation with Martin King, I determined I would get myself a timetable and plan to get into the South. And determined that I would probably go to Atlanta, Georgia, where he was, of course — no, he wasn't there yet, he was in Montgomery, but be in the South — and where there was a theological school that I could re-enter.

And, so, that was my tentative thinking about it, but along the way that fall, I decided to call the Fellowship of Reconciliation — A.J. Muste, who was another of my mentors, and tell A. J. that I was going to move south, because I — since college days, it was one of the areas where I wanted to work one day. So, he received the news, [but said] don't make any other plans until we have talked again. I had said I was going to go to Atlanta and what not.

And a few days after this, he called me back, I was still in Oberlin, and said we'd like to offer you the job of southern secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, will you do it. And I said, yes, of course. And was eager for it. Of course, I recognize this was also the way in which God was working in my life. Because I was going on my own without any kinds of commitments ahead of time. But this provided me with a specific position, so I could go into the South with a job.

And then he said that Glenn Smiley, the director of field services of the FOR would be talking to me about it. And, so, as Glenn and I talked, Glenn suggested that I not go to Atlanta, but that I go to Nashville. I knew Nashville. I had been there two or three times for various church meetings in the 40's and the 50's. And, so, I determined that that's where we would go.

Why Nashville?

In spite of the Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama was not yet ready to give up on segregation. Nashville had segregation, but there were no laws sustaining segregation. You could get arrested for breaking the custom, but there were no laws. It was enforced by intimidation and fear and police would enforce it. So, you didn't have a city where, therefore, you did not have to go to court to overthrow laws in relationship to Jim Crow. So... it was a question I think of the history of it. Also, Nashville had, prior to Atlanta, some sense that we are not a Deep South community. We are a moderate city.

You also had a place like Fisk [University] where these things could happen together, where people could meet with [a] fair amount of ease. You could also do that at Skerrett as well. So, you had a couple sites where multi-racial [gatherings] could take place without anyone blinking an eye about it. I think it was the timing in my own case, in my own sense, I feel that it was the right moment in history, right moment in the environment for something to happen there. Another advantage of Nashville, I found out, was that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been organized in February of '57. And one of the men at that founding meeting of King's organization was Kelly Miller Smith, who was the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Nashville.

So, we had in Nashville, already functioning, the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, as organized, as a direct chapter of SCLC. So, you had a chapter that already started to get itself together and to get really engaged in talking. And that was propitious because Kelly and C.T. Vivian and Andrew White and a number of the other people in the Nashville Christian Leadership Council did not want to sit around and wait around. They wanted something to happen and they wanted to help make something happen. So, in the winter-spring of '58, they had asked Glenn Smiley and myself to do workshops on non-violence with them, which we did.

Developing the Nashville strategy:

[The workshops] were designed — and I don't remember how many sessions we had — they were designed to help the Nashville Christian Leadership Council decide "Where shall we begin? What's going to be the first action issue that we move into place?" And it is out of those workshops that came the decision that we will desegregate downtown Nashville. And for me that was a revelation. That, of course, was a first Gandhian step, that was the first step of non-violence, to research and examine and focus on an issue, choose a target, choose an issue.

One of my criticisms of the peace churches [and] pacifism, that it felt to me in my observation as a student in the late 40's, early 50's, and a heavy reader about our world, it looked to me to be too passive. And I began to prefer the Gandhian term satyagraha, or the Gandhian non-violence, because it to me was supposed to have a kind of a militant aggressiveness about looking at life and going forward and going towards it. So, we saw ourselves, therefore, taking the first step of the non-violent method; that is, looking at our situation and thoroughly analyzing it and determining, therefore, what would be our focus, what's the thing that we can correct or change.

And it was a big decision, it was well done in my judgment. And the Negro women in the sessions were for me extremely pervasive, because we heard from them. As we analyze the whole thing, schools and — school desegregation had begun by that time in Nashville. So, as we analyzed the different situations, it was the women who impressed me and I think everyone else with the notion that "You men don't do the shopping for our families, we do the shopping and we shop downtown. And there's no place downtown where we can stop to rest our feet. If we have children, there's no place downtown where we can stop to give them a rest, get them a cup of ice cream. And we do get insults downtown. And if you have a large family, then you're shopping downtown for three or four hours. And you're dead tired." And they made it an issue about the difference between the men and the women — that we men did not perhaps go downtown that often, because our jobs were elsewhere. But it was the women who did the shopping and they told some of the stories of the things that they face. And it was based upon that — those interventions that we overwhelmingly came to the consensus by the spirit that we're going to set out to desegregate downtown Nashville.

And it was based upon that decision then that we said that in the fall we would begin with workshops; we would test the places. We would look at some place and then we would begin a movement of sit-ins if it didn't bring about change.

On Organizing the Workshops:

We basically did announcements through churches and all, Kelly Miller and Alexander Anderson, as I recall, was at Clark Church. C.T. Vivian was at Community Church. Andrew White was an AME general secretary. So, we passed the word around in that fashion. Kelly Miller made contact with American Baptist Theological School. I got a call from a white exchange student at Fisk, Paul LaPrad, who said what's going on, and how can I help, and I said, we have workshops on non-violence with the intention that we're going to desegregate downtown Nashville. So, why don't you come, that's what you can do, you can join this and bring others with you.

In any case, we did get the word out. We didn't get that big a response, but we didn't need that big a response. We weren't going to be changed by what kind of response we had. We got sufficient response that — and also a faithful response of people who came back each workshop.

As I recall, they were Monday evenings and they were held at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church. And we did a series. And we took the whole group through basically a holistic view of non-violence, its history, what it is, its roots in the Bible, it's roots in Christian thought, the methods of non-violence. We told the stories of non-violence, such as Montgomery, which was one of the big stories that we rehearsed for them. We did role-playing. We talked about the Congress of Racial Equality and the experiences that that group had had in several parts of the country.

We talked about the first freedom ride that... was in Pennsylvania and some places in New England [in the 1840s]. We talked about John Wolman and his efforts against slavery, the William Penn experiment in Pennsylvania — with the Native Americans. So we mixed contemporary with history and then we did role-playing. We tried to analyze what we might face in going down to these restaurants. And so, it was that kind of a workshop. But the emphasis was on preparation to sit in towards desegregation of downtown Nashville.

We brought in international issues. We related issues of race and jobs and economy and what not, so it wasn't a one-stroke thing. We did not teach going to the lunch counters for the purpose of eating a hamburger. We taught it within the context of it's obviously a convenient place to begin desegregating Nashville.

I stressed the Gandhian idea of our being engaged in an experiment. In an experiment, you have to keep figuring out what happened and why, and what didn't happen. And you have to lay the framework for allowing that experiment to help you to the next step.

So, in central committee meetings and the workshops themselves, and in jails together and in lunch counters where we sat-in together — there was always a barrage of conversation. And almost from the beginning, it was a kind of practical analysis. What about this, that happened over here? Did you all see that? Then how did that relate to non-violence, and so forth. So, there was kind of an ongoing evaluation, discussion, analysis of what was happening. So, the people were very deep into that.

There were fierce discussions. Jim Bevel says the first time heard me, he said that "this man is a fool. But it might — he's gonna do something, and so I'll stick around for a while. " There was skepticism about my bringing [international issues] — the cold war and that sort of stuff, militarization. There were questions about that. There were fierce questions, of course, about — that you can't defend yourself non-violently. You got to be able to stand up and take your licks and fight back. And that whole business, of course, is very strong in the American scene, because that's how we're weaned.

So, there was a lot of that and I kept coming back to the business of how, in fact, that even people who say I'll hit back do not spend their lives hitting back when they're getting insulted and what not. That would be foolishness and they know it intuitively. So that in a place in a society where you can be insulted, they have learned to use their wit, their tongues, they have learned to turn the other cheek, even if they never called it that. And that women especially, did not engage in self defense by balling up a fist or grabbing a baseball bat. They were even better at turning an angry word around in other ways.

So, we had to come back to that fairly often, because that was the key issue. As in many ways it still is in the United States. A person has a right to defend themselves. It's a thing that's often said, even now. So, how you recognize that there are alternatives to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth in your personal life was an important issue. We did jawbone on that quite a bit.

On nonviolence as a Christian principle:

My approach to non-violence had always been out of a Christian ethos. So in the workshops in Nashville, as in the workshops I still do, I spend a certain amount of time on the person of Jesus as a non-violent athlete. And I try to show that in the actual teachings of the New Testament. In that particular series of workshops, you had a Catholic, sensitive Catholic woman, Diane [Nash]. You had someone wanting to be a Baptist preacher in John Lewis. You had Andrew White, an AME preacher.

In other words, I'm saying, you had an entire group who came out of Christian churches. Now, they may not have heard Jesus interpreted as a non-violent warrior, but they could very quickly see, as I led them through different passages, like the Sermon on the Mount, where — in Matthew 5 — where the whole business of an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth is talked about.

But where also there's that powerful phrase in which Jesus said, "You've heard it said of old, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say unto you, you shall love your enemy." And I happen to think, then and now, that that teaching... is the cutting edge for Christian spirituality. Because that says that in our kind of world, there are enemies of life, there are folk who love death, there are folk who deny your humanity, who would obliterate you, so they're our enemies. And, yet, the insistence is that you can see your enemy not as someone to whom your pour out your anger and venom, but you can see your enemy as another human being.

You can see the image of God in this person who's out to do you in. Now, in the black church, that had often been taught theoretically. And I'm sure that John Lewis and Bernard [Lafayette] had all heard that in their churches in the past. But to talk about — within the context of our now moving to overthrow some forms of segregation and racism, that gave it a radical edge.

And, so, there — the Christian church was wrong. I usually talk about the fall of Christianity, when Constantine in the year 323 determined that no one could be a soldier for his armies unless they were baptized as a Christian. So that wedded the church to the state and, of course, that's been the single most idolatrous practice of the church ever since. Jesus, in fact, actually, in a number of places lets people know that violence will never be of any value. For example, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Judas comes to identify him, kisses him for the soldiers and others who have come with him — one of the people with him, one of his friends, a disciple, pulls out a sword and cuts off the ear of one of the servants of the high priest, who is an enemy. And Jesus tells that person to put up the sword. They who take the sword will perish by the sword. That's a very concrete experience documented in each of the three synoptic gospels.

You can't get around that. In Matthew, Jesus goes so far as to say... don't you know that if I ask my father, he will send me 12 legions of angels to take care of the situation. [laughter] So in that situation Jesus says, "wait a moment, God has the power to make certain that I don't get arrested if that's what the course of action.... put up your sword, you can't use the sword." So the Christian church has badly distorted Jesus that they call the Christ. And that's been my position for a long long time and it was in the '50's.

On the goals of the Nashville movement, and the participants:

We did not pretend. We said these workshops were going to go — we were going to desegregate downtown Nashville. Our first step was going to be desegregate lunch counters and restaurants. So, we were tied to a very practical task. So anyone who came had to be persuaded that this is something they wanted to do, and they wanted to find out how we were going to do it. In that sense, we had people with high motivation. We did, on the other side of the coin, however, have people who were prepared to follow this action, but who were not prepared to let the notion of non-violence permeate into — in the way in which Diane and Jim Bevel and others did. They were not going to go that far. They were not going to let it become a transforming experience and a change agent in their lives. And I named somebody who I think was like that from the very beginning, that was Marion Barry, who was in a couple of those workshops. I don't know if he came to all of them.

We did in the movement, as we got involved in the actual sit-ins, we did have people who expressed... doubts. And we did not — we sought never to demean them for that. But when we knew that there was some risk in the demonstrations we were planning, we invited people who felt that way not to participate in the specific demonstration but to go do something else, get involved in the other support works, transportation, making the sandwiches, painting the posters.

So, we got them involved, because we did develop the philosophy, that in the struggle there were many different tasks that had to be done and that everyone was not going to feel free enough and secure enough to go on a demonstration, especially — it was a demonstration where we understood full well, there could be violence. There could be arrests.

So, we made it a point to insist that, you know, if you cannot do it now, don't worry about it. Here's a task that needs doing — go there and work, continue to come to the workshops, continue to work with the movement and when you feel that you're ready, then join it. Because we did make it very, very clear that there would be no retaliation of fist or speech when we were in actual demonstrations, when we were in actual public encounters, there would be no retaliation in kind. And to my knowledge that pretty much prevailed for several years in Nashville.

The sit-ins begin:

We had scouted downtown in November for both giving people an example of sitting in and also to begin to research what the attitudes of the managers and waitresses would be in these different places. In November on two or three Saturdays, we had small groups, maybe between four and six people, they went into Cain-Sloane, they went into Harvey's department store. I think they did two or three of the five and ten cent store lunch counters.

That was a preliminary step. As I said, number one, we wanted people to have practical experience of making it happen, of doing it. Number two, we quite specifically had people geared to try to talk the manager or some person responsible to feel them out, see where they were, why they were refusing us service and a whole variety of things like that.

In November, we had pretty much probably selected where we were going to go. So that in February when we gathered the first time, which was perhaps a Wednesday or Thursday evening, the second week of February — because the first sit-in in Nashville was the large scale sit-in. The first one was, I think, a Saturday, the 13th.

Now, we decided on Saturday, because it was simpler for students, there were no classes. They were our chief force, they were our chief manpower resource. That was a fairly simple issue. Later on in the sit-in campaign, we did do some after-school things for an hour after classes, 4 o'clock. But we started out doing it each Saturday. We did, as I remember, three Saturdays in February and then continued in March, perhaps by the middle of March we had picked up to twice a week with late afternoon sit-ins.

We had tried to prepare the police and the managers. And their attitude about it, I think, was that this will not last. And as long we were well behaved and peaceful, they were not going to let anything happen. And that's exactly what did happen. The first two weeks — I know, later on, store managers told us that they saw to it that there could be no congregating of young white men in their stores. They kept people moving — who they might be suspicious of. The police were low key, but they were visible enough and available enough, plain clothes people, that crowds were kept moving, traffic continued on Church Street.

So, they were very good in my judgment in those first couple of weeks in seeing to it that no crowds, unruly crowds, threatening crowds could congregate anywhere. But as it did not go away, then they took it with more seriousness and as they recognized the intensity of the whole struggle, so that by the last Saturday in February they were threatening mayhem and arrests and what not on us.

And we tried to stay in touch. I, myself, did one of the visits with the chief of police when he was talking about, there will be arrests, and he was talking about we're not sure what it is, maybe trespassing, maybe loitering, maybe breaching the peace. So, it was clear to me that they were searching for some ordinance that they could use for the arrest. And, so, it was also clear to me that with that attitude, therefore, their careful police work would change.

And, so, the central committee, we spent a fair amount of time hammering out a plan for that last Saturday of February anticipating there would be violence, anticipating there would be arrests. We made certain that people understood that they would be arrested, that there could be violence. We tried to be certain that our strongest and best leaders were leading each group that went in. Of course, by this time, we also had a little leaflet of instructions that we had put out asking everyone who went in the demonstration to agree to do these things. We also had devised that we would have fairly disciplined groups go into each of the places that we decided to sit-in on that Saturday. We decided that we'd have a second group ready for each store. So that if there were arrests there, they were to stay away from the store, stay in the crowds on the outside.

They had a spokesperson who would signal them when they would go in if they did go in. So, we had — initially that morning, we had some 600 people ready to be arrested, in fact. And, again, in our screening, because the central committees said you have to run the operation, you can't sit-in today, so, I was in charge — the First Baptist Church was doing the orientation, selecting the groups, selecting the leadership, the whole business.

And the net result was that we did have approximately 600 people. We did weed some people out. We did take the precaution this time. If a guy had a pocket knife on him, which, of course, was fairly common, they left them out. If a girl had a fingernail file, objects that could be possibly remotely seen as a weapon, we had folk leave all that stuff at First Baptist Church and collect it later. And it worked magnificently. It was a great group. We could have probably — if the police were ready for us, we could have arrested a thousand, two thousand people that day without any hesitation.

And all of our people were magnificent. The violence did occur. The young white men were in the stores, taunting, spitting, putting cigarettes on people, knocking two or three people off the stools and on to the floor. And our group, they were just really excellent. They sat through the discipline until the police came in and chased the guys out and then arrested everybody.

And as soon as — let's just say if Woolworth's store was, as soon as that group was arrested from Woolworth's and were being placed in the paddy wagon, the paddy wagon went off, then the police moved to another counter to arrest that group. And while they were moving to that counter, then our group on the outside moved in who were designated for Woolworth's. Then took those places at Woolworth's, so we had a second group in place, within ten minutes I suppose, after the police had arrested — and had left the store.

And the same thing happened. They went — as I recall, we had five restaurants that day. They arrested some in all five of them. But as soon as those arrests were over, then another group went in and took their places. And after some 80 folk had been arrested, the police asked the stores to close down and no longer serve. And that's what happened.

They were ill-prepared for a mass civil disobedience effort. They had anticipated that once arrests began, once the violence took place and the arrests began, our movement would dissipate, would be chased away. Because that's the purpose, after all, of doing the violence, that's the purpose of doing the arresting. It's hopeful that then whatever this is will vanish and that's the end of it. That didn't happen.

We had observers always at every demonstration, who stayed away from us, who stayed in the crowd watching and making notes and taking pictures if they could. They said that when the police... found out that having arrested a group in Woolworth's there now were another 10-15 people there sitting-in a lunch counter — they said you could see a difference in their whole make-up.

This was something they had never heard of. This was a brand new experience. And that especially since most of the people were black people, who didn't like being arrested and were afraid of being arrested because of the harassment and brutality that could take place, it was astonishing to them that here, indeed, were black folk coming back into the counters to be arrested. Our observers said that you could see the way in which the police walked from store to store that they were discovering that this was something brand new, unexpected and they were not ready for it.

The jail wasn't full, I don't think. But we — as I say, that day we only had some 88 people arrested. But we had a church full all the time with more people out saying I'll get there at 1 o'clock and I'll sit-in this afternoon, and so forth and so on. So, I think that our preparations and our plans really just were exactly what was needed and the city and police simply did not expect that this was a movement and that we weren't going to be deterred by violence and arrest.

On the store boycott:

There are various people who take credit for having called the boycott, but it was in the mind of the central committee. Because our plan from the very beginning was that you start off in simple ways and you escalate as you go along. But you do this in a deliberate fashion. And economic withdrawal, which is one of the terms I used to use for the boycott, was in the plans. And, of course, we did announce it that very next week, after these arrests.

By this time, of course, we did have mass meetings going on. And in those mass meetings, we were making announcements, we were having inspirational speeches, we were talking about the movement, we were talking about non-violence. So, we had those things going on already. Announcements were being made in churches about things, so we had a network going on. The community largely supported the sit-ins from the very beginning, without reservation. I think that would be the case. They didn't all understand it. Some thought at the same moment that Nashville was a moderate city and this effort troubled things unnecessarily, that in time these things would move and change on their own pace. And, of course, students were very impatient with that kind of argument, and so forth.

But when we announced the boycott and the withdrawal from downtown Nashville, it was in a mass meeting either Tuesday or Wednesday night the following week. These were always very large crowds, churches packed full and a variety of people from the central committee, from the community, presenting things. And it was out of here that the boycott was announced.

So, that would mean that things would go around the city. In addition to that, there was a black newspaper that was very helpful. There was at least one radio station that concentrated on the black community. So, all of that together, plus the churches, plus the preachers made that the word go out. At the same moment, you have to remember that the idea of a boycott was very much in consciousness of black people around the South by that time, because of the Montgomery bus boycott. So, they knew what that meant, not spending your money in a place where you couldn't shop or where you couldn't work, and so on.

So, it wasn't as though this was out of the blue. It was, in fact, a part of the arsenal of non-violence and a lot of people naturally were a part of it. In fact, I would simply say to you, and I have no way of affirming this, but I strongly suspect that from the very first sit-in there were black people who said I won't shop downtown again. And so, by that time, you see, that was an idea whose time had also arrived. So that the announcing of the boycott was readily accepted. Because as we tried also to say, it allowed for the whole community to be participants in the movement.

Because that's one of the things that we, in the non-violent world always teach; namely, that in the non-violent movement everyone can be a participant. Children can participate, women can participate, men can participate. Young people, old people. That is a kind of equality that what is so important is the vitality of your character, your courage and your concern for the change that you want. That's what equalizes everybody, so that it's not a question of the survival of the fittest or those who are physically in the best condition are the only ones who can do the work. Everyone can do the work.

On the similarities between violence and non-violence:

[There are] similarities between a good social movement and some kind of military order and organization and structure. I've often wrestled with this. You don't want a dictator — you don't want a hierarchical, absolute obedience thing. But in our little statement of the discipline for each person who went on a non-violent demonstration in Nashville, I think the tenth one was about, we will obey the leadership of our leaders in this particular demonstration.

That, to me, was very important because there has to be an ability of all the folk in the movement to take orders, to take instructions. And I don't like always using the language that gives the notion of authoritarianism or hierarchical, but I do insist that that language has to be used. Because you cannot go on a demonstration with 25 people doing whatever they want to do. They have to have a common discipline. And that's a key word for me that the difficulty with non-violent people and efforts is that they don't recognize the necessity of fierce discipline and training, and strategizing and planning and recruiting and doing the kinds of things that you do to have a movement.

That can't happen spontaneously. It has to be done systematically, almost like anything else that's going to be of value and will have an impact. So there are concrete similarities between violence and non-violence.

I'll give you the most, perhaps, significant one for me. Both violence and non-violence must require suffering. Violence has a very simple dynamic. I make you suffer more than I suffer. I make you suffer until you cry uncle. And you surrender. That's what a war is, it's violence. So, suffering is there. Along with the word of suffering, soldiers must be willing to make ultimate sacrifices. The difference with non-violence is that in a non-violent movement, we make every effort not to impose suffering on the opponent.

We don't want to beat the opponent up. We don't think that does any good. Instead, we absorb the suffering that the opponent is ready to throw at us and give us. So, as Martin King said, we will absorb suffering in our very own bodies. Of course, that's good Gandhian principle. That's also a principle of the Christian faith, though the Christian faith doesn't accept it; namely, that Jesus absorbed in the cross the suffering of the world. I mean, it's a time honored Christian dogma. Instead of putting it out, he took it in. And in taking it in forgave it and overcame it. That's one of the similarities of violence and non-violence, sacrifice and suffering are words, that in both cases that have to be used, but they have a different meaning.

On the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby's home, and the march to City Hall:

It, of course, was the effort of the enemy to scare us off. And Alexander Looby was the sort of dean of the African-American attorneys in Nashville, was a member of the city council, was a very highly respected Episcopal layman, so he was a highly respected man. And had basically organized all the lawyers in Nashville to provide the movement with legal defense wherever this is necessary. So, they had this whole battery of lawyers who were available to us. And they did it pro bono, which was hard on them.

So Alexander Looby was in the forefront of the court cases. And, so, that's probably the reason his home was selected. It was done for the purpose of mayhem or even killing the Loobys, which, fortunately, it did not. But it did galvanize the black community in recognizing that we had fierce opposition. We were having a central committee meeting that morning, but when we heard of the Looby bombing, our calls began to go out very early, and we began to gather to talk about it. And, so, between about 5 or 6 o'clock and 7 or 8 o'clock, we had gathered, we were strategizing and as we were strategizing, people were coming and going to start the process of making it happen. So, we quickly decided to have a silent march from Tennessee State down Jefferson Street to the city hall and make an effort to talk to the mayor himself.

And that did come off very, very well. It was a rather remarkable experience, probably never before in the South had 5,000 black people marched in dignity and silence. We quickly had selected Diane Nash and C.T. Vivian to be our spokespeople once we got to the city hall. Because that was another thing we did, we selected specifically who was going to speak at various times. And this changed from around the group — it didn't fall on one or two people, by deliberate intention on our part.

And, so, C.T. and Diane were given some notes about what to say, but Diane with the kind of character and intelligence that she had was able to ask Mayor West a couple additional questions, in which for the first time the Mayor said that is was wrong for us not to be served in these restaurants, which was the first time that any major official in the city had said that.

On the desegregation of the lunch counters, and the movement's next steps:

[The bombing of the Looby home] was April the 19th. From almost the very beginning, we had people talking in the stores with managers and owners, because we saw that as a part of the ongoing process of negotiation, both to isolate what was going on with them and to isolate who the people were who might hopefully be folk at which change could be made. And to know who the responsibilities — who could take responsibility for making decisions. And I don't recall if by April the 19th we had put together a formal negotiating committee. But certainly within a few days of April the 19th, we had put together a central committee, negotiating committee to talk with the group of merchants where we were engaged in the sit-ins.

We rejected earlier the mayor's putting together of a biracial committee. We rejected that. Not because we didn't trust the committee or the process, but because we said the merchants need to talk directly with us. They need to know that we can stop the demonstrations with their willingness to make changes. And, so, we planned all along that eventually this would happen. So negotiations began and I have to look up when they precisely began, but somewhere around April the 19th, they must have begun.

And we put together a plan, because we knew by this time in our own conversations that merchants, at least two or three of the merchants with whom we were talking said they would make the change, but there was no way to do it. And that was the chief thing. So, based upon that, we said, well, we'll come up with the plan that will allow them to do it. So, we did have a plan.

Harvey Department Store, for example, we learned early on was owned by a company in Chicago. They called themselves operating by the mores of Nashville. Greenfield Pitts [the vice president in charge of the Nashville store] admitted to some of our observers, informal people who went in to talk with him early on that he was in business to have lots of customers, not to send customers away. And that it hurt Harvey Department Store to have segregated restaurants. He admitted this early on.

And as I recall, what he told some of our folk was that "a good 30 percent of my customers are Negroes. And you think that as a merchant, I'm going to tell my customer, 'you can buy from there, that department, but you can't buy from that department?'" He said, "of course, I want all the business I can get." So, to me this is an imposition. So, he was early on willing to change, but said it couldn't be done in the light of the customs of the city and so forth and so on.

So, based upon some of those things, we determined well, we'll have to show them how it can be done. And we, again, followed basically a non-violent plan. We suggested to them, which was a great relief to them, that there would be no announcement that the demonstrations had ended. There would be no announcements that black people were being served. But we selected a date and as I recall it was May 10th, when they would have prepared their people. No announcements, no press, no police. They would have prepared their waiters and waitresses.

We would have selected people from our movement, who on the basis of only two to each store — at each counter, each restaurant — would come in quietly, sit down, they would be served without a hitch. So, there would be no public announcement of this, there would be no special preparations except our training and their training. And they — they bought that.

One of the important principles of non-violence is that when you — when you're able to develop a movement that can have a major change, a step towards justice, a steps eradicating the harm — that that's a victory for everybody. It's no time to crow over victory and defeat. On the contrary, a part of the follow-up of the non-violent movement is the business of reconciliation, that former opponents can become friends. That the opportunity for the enmity that may have been there to be dissipated, to be forgiven and for people to move on with a new life, a new relationship has to be permitted. And that's, of course, one of the reasons we say that non-violence is vastly superior to violence. Because violence tends to have a cycle. It keeps going and keeps widening, revenge and an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth keeps going on.

But from the non-violent perspective, you have to break the violence of the hostility and the enmity. People have to come some day [and] accept one another and be willing to live side by side, work side by side and work together for the common good. So, we were not interested in an announcement of victory and we were not interested in crowing about it. That's the — that's the literal truth. We were prepared to call for a plan that would help the merchants recognize it could happen. And, in fact, we said, let's do this for two weeks.

And we sent people in at designated times. We did — the negotiating committee and the merchants agreed — at designated times. And this plan would go forward for a minimum of two weeks. Well, before the first week was up, the merchants were calling us and saying there's no need to go on with the plan. It's worked. So, we'll just forget about it, let life take its course. So, that's what did happen.

From the very beginning our goal was desegregating downtown Nashville. And we knew that there were many components of that. From the very beginning in our face to face conversations with the merchants downtown, we talked about jobs, we talked about restroom facilities. So, we talked about a variety of things. We let them know that this, from our point of view, was only the first step. We wanted to see black folk who were clerks, who could be trained as supervision and manager — if a third of your customers are Negroes, then surely we should be more than just maids and janitors. We could be waitresses, we can sell.

So, from the very beginning, we made it clear to them that our larger goal was transforming downtown Nashville. And we sought from the beginning to talk about all the facets of what that meant. I don't know if we made an official agreement with the negotiating committee. But we did recognize ourselves that as took place with the lunch counters, then we would be analyzing and evaluating the situation and we'd also then begin to do some testing of other restaurants and lunch counters in the area that were not included in the first group.

On the legacy of Nashville:

In one way, probably, that legacy is still going on. I think, in particular, Bernard Lafayette's work in doing non-violent workshops in places like South Africa and elsewhere, as well as in various places in the United States.... So the legacy in my judgment, the seeds are still bearing fruit and more than what any one person, I think, knows.

But on the other side of the coin, it seems to me that that is a piece of American history that needs study and reflection, because in a time where our culture has become more a culture of violence, a culture in many ways of meanness, a culture of denigrating people. With my Christian religion being perhaps the bastion of doing it with the whole bashing of gay and lesbian people that's going on, which, in my judgment is just — I do not understand it by this time. To have major figures like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and James Dodson and James Kennedy and others just beating up on people which makes me feel as though they're coming right out of the theology and the spirituality of racism and they don't even know it.

But it is a piece of American history that if given time and reflection could show us that there are ways for people to come together and work for the common good, even in the conflictive time that there are realms of the spirit and of the intellect and of the character of life, that could make a difference. If we could find it in ourselves to reach on the inside and look for the ways in which we proceed and not be dependent upon technology and materialism, to see that we have been gifted with life and that life, in itself is the cauldron out of which we can deal with the culture of violence, with some of our fears about crime and our fears about the safety of schools and a whole range of other things — that these are not insoluble problems, that the resources are there for moving us away from where we've come and back towards a more kind of peaceful land and relationship. And I want to quickly say that it's no longer the peace of segregation, that kind of peace I think is never again available to us.

But the kinds of relationships in Nashville that formed, that became genuine relationships of community and understanding and of commitment to the common good, that was repeated in other places, but it could happen in many different ways again.