Waging a Good War

were all addressed in careful, systematic ways by those in the civil rights movement—recruiting, training, planning, logistics, communications, and more. I began to see the Movement as a kind of war—that is, a series of campaigns on carefully chosen ground that eventually led to victory. The Siege of Montgomery. The Battle of Birmingham. The March on Washington. The frontal assault at Selma.

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Another activist, Charles Sherrod of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in looking back, said, “It was a war. Though it was a non-violent war, but it was indeed a war.” Cleveland Sellers said of the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi, “It was almost like a shorter version of probably the Vietnam War.” And remember that the central tactic of the Movement—the march—is also the most basic of military operations. Indeed, even in war, marching sometimes is more decisive than violence. For example, Napoleon observed that his great victory at Ulm in 1805 was achieved not by arms but by legs, as his foot soldiers outmaneuvered his Austrian foe.

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And Mississippi’s Freedom Summer is treated here not as a somewhat starry-eyed white liberal program to advance integration, but instead as a calculated campaign to expose privileged white northerners to the same risks of violence that Black southerners daily endured, and through that hard process to help Black Mississippians gain a voice in politics. War also offers a vocabulary that peace does not:* The Montgomery bus boycott was primarily defensive, in that it was a withdrawal of patronage, while the Nashville sit-ins were offensive, in that they were demands for service.*

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war he stood far ahead of his peers. Just as Sherman would invent a new way to fight in the Civil War, crossing Georgia without logistical support or even a line of communications, Bevel would devise a risky new approach to civil rights marches that shocked some yet proved essential to the Movement’s single biggest victory, the Birmingham campaign of 1963.

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It even sheds new light on well-known figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., underscoring that a significant aspect of his greatness was his ability to formulate strategy and then—equally important—to explain it to his followers and to the world at large. Strategy is a deceptive problem, seemingly simple when it works, but devilishly complex when it doesn’t. King looms over this book, but he is hardly presented here as the sole…

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Overall, the civil rights movement was better organized and its participants far more methodical and careful than tends to be recognized now. It is a point that movement veterans make again and again in discussing their approach to bringing about social change, and is worth heeding today. Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a veteran of the Movement who served for years…

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Again and again, members of the civil rights movement emphasized and exhibited self-control in their public actions. As King once put it, “Those of us who love peace…

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“There is no civil disobedience possible, until the crowds behave like…

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The major reason for that misapprehension by historians, I suspect, is that the influence of Gandhi generally is more evident in King’s actions than in his words—as will be seen in the discussions…

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Strategy, by contrast, involves the larger subject of understanding who you are, and next identifying one’s goals, and only then developing an overarching plan for using tactics to achieve those goals. One of the Movement’s great strengths was that its leaders formulated a strategy, then developed tactics that fit their approach, and finally…

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That’s a major problem, because tactical excellence without a strategic understanding resembles a Ferrari without a steering wheel—the vehicle may be powerful and look good…

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This American was none other than James Lawson. He had moved to India to study Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, but now he began thinking it was time to head back to the United States. A few years later he would become an adviser to King, a key figure in shaping the civil rights movement’s direction, and a major point of transmission of Gandhi’s teachings to the American civil rights movement.

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Lawson thought people generally did not understand the term “nonviolence.” He said in one interview, “The definition that most Americans have of nonviolence is that if you get hit in the face then you take it, you don’t do anything.… That, you know, it’s laying down.” He preferred the Sanskrit word satyagraha, which can be loosely translated as “the tenacious power of the soul” or more understandably, as “clinging to the truth.” In practical terms, Lawson continued, nonviolence was much more confrontational than passive resistance: “It meant trying to find superior skills in resisting.” One of Gandhi’s veteran followers, Krishnalal Shridharani, went even further, flatly asserting that satyagraha is “an instrument of aggression” that in fact has “more in common with war than with Western pacifism.”

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Theory was one thing; practicing the philosophy was another. “The experience in Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books that I had read,” he later wrote. “As the days unfolded I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence.… Many issues I had not cleared up intellectually were now solved in the sphere of practical action.” Drawing this distinction between theory and practice also may have been King’s way of achieving some distance from seasoned activists such as Rustin who wanted to guide the younger man. He was not going to act merely as a vehicle for the views of others.

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As Rustin summarized it, “The glorious thing is that he came to a profoundly deep understanding of nonviolence through the struggle itself.” That assessment may be both romantic and condescending. As noted earlier, King may not have let on to outsiders how deeply he had studied Gandhi and nonviolence. Rustin could be high-handed, noted Harris Wofford, a sympathetic white adviser to King and later an aide to President Kennedy, and he sometimes “acted as if King were a precious puppet whose symbolic actions were to be planned by a Gandhian high command.”

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never was a stranger in the American South. As the political scientist Gene Sharp observes, “it is usually forgotten how un-Indian Gandhi was in many ways.” Gandhi worked constantly at self-denial; King often indulged in food, alcohol, and the pleasures of the flesh. Gandhi immersed himself in rural India as King rarely did in the rural American South. Gandhi was not tied to weekly sermons at a church inherited from his father. And Gandhi thrived when confined to jail, while King languished when imprisoned.

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transformative campaigns. Both also had tendencies to announce wildly ambitious goals and then leave them behind. This propensity suggests that they did not always necessarily think they would reach those goals but sometimes talked about them perhaps in the hope of expanding the imaginations of their followers and even of their adversaries. They were offering different views of the world and asking people, or even forcing them, to consider those views. Both were notably adept at using the media to advance their causes. Both saw nonviolence not just as a political tactic but as a life-encompassing philosophy. And the lives of both ended with assassination. Some of King’s most impressive victories involved taking plays from Gandhi’s book. This would be especially true when the Movement strategist James Bevel, who also was deeply influenced by Gandhi, became involved.

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the lessons of the boycott. The first was that Montgomery’s Black population could come together and maintain a unified position. “We have discovered,” he declared, “that we can stick together for a common cause.” Another was that white aggression could be handled, especially if there was high morale and unity in the Movement. “Threats and violence do not necessarily intimidate those who are sufficiently aroused and non-violent,” he explained. And as a result of the boycott, Blacks’ self-image had improved: “We have gained a new sense of dignity and destiny.”

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First, it was built upon the existing infrastructure of Black churches, which kept the entire community involved. Rustin wrote in a letter to King, “It thus had the strength of unity which the school integration efforts have lacked, thereby leaving the fight to heroic but isolated individuals.” Rustin did not say so, but there was a Gandhian connection here: The southern Black church was essentially conservative in its values, respectful of established ways. So, too, was Gandhi, who sought to compel his opponents to live up to their belief in their own humanity. Second, the nature of the boycott required daily participation by everyone, and this was visible to the entire community.

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It was not just a reliable refuge in a hostile world but also what the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called “a nation within a nation.”

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Historically, the Black church had been seen by activists such as the great historian W. E. B. Du Bois as an impediment. As the historian Richard Kluger notes, Du Bois thought Black ministers were “consumed by trivialities and their own personal influence among their congregants; their sermons were out of date and provided no leadership.” Now they were stepping up and leading the people. In military terms, the churches had become the command posts of the Movement, secure locations where plans could be made, training sessions held, and orders issued.

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It is easy to overlook the importance of such arrangements that free up the top leader of an organization to do what he or she does best. The motto of the senior commander should be “Do only what only you can do.” Everything else should be left to subordinates. During World War II, for example, Dwight Eisenhower tried to focus on the absolutely essential, while delegating to others the merely important.

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But the civil rights movement, to its great credit, was remarkably attentive to the question of endings. Nonviolent philosophy emphasizes that the final step in an action should always be reconciliation. Thus deep consideration of the ending was built into Movement campaigns from the very

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resume riding the buses with dignity and courtesy. Any boycotter who could not behave on the buses with restraint, they instructed, should “walk for another week or two.” And when integrated rides began, the Montgomery Improvement Association assigned two ministers to ride on each line at the morning and evening rush hours to monitor passenger behavior.

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There are three basic ways to measure conflict: scope, duration, and intensity. The geographical scope of this effort would be the South. Just what its duration would be was anyone’s guess—some predicted many decades. And in the weeks following the success of the boycott, it became evident that the fight would be intense. The goal was simple: for Black Americans to be treated as humans like anyone else.

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thousand.” The wall of Shuttlesworth’s house blew out and the roof collapsed, yet he found himself still lying in his bed, somehow alive, probably because the mattress had been wrapped around him by the blast. “At that moment, all fear was taken from me,” he said later. “I never feared anything since that time.”

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When Shuttlesworth emerged from the smoking wreckage, a police officer—white, as there were no Black police in Birmingham at that time—gazed at him and said, “Reverend, if I were you, I’d get out of town as fast as I could.” Shuttlesworth was an unusual man—a moonshiner turned minister—and was always a fighter. He responded, “Officer, you are not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration.”

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Two weeks later, a bomb was left on King’s front steps but failed to detonate. Thus was a pattern established: successful civil rights efforts would be followed by quick waves of vengeful white violence.

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Historians tend to measure events in the civil rights campaign by whether they resulted in changes in laws or practices, but this neglects the effect that each episode had on inspiring others to join the Movement or to support it financially. Such instances of rallying to the cause were certainly as significant as legal results in sustaining the Movement.

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One of the major lessons of the Montgomery boycott’s success was the need for a regional organization that would plan actions, recruit and train volunteers, raise funds, and maintain discipline during campaigns. King took the first big step by inviting sixty Black ministers and community leaders to his father’s church in Atlanta for a meeting on January 10, 1957, just a few weeks after the end of the boycott. There, at the suggestion of Bayard Rustin, who had prevailed in his rivalry with Glenn Smiley about advising King, they formed a group they at first called the Negro Leaders Conference on Nonviolent Integration, which soon would be renamed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

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And early in 1959, he went on an extended pilgrimage to India. King still had a lot to learn about setting strategic goals and overseeing an organization. It did not help him that in another act of harassment by officials, Alabama authorities indicted him for allegedly filing false tax returns. He was eventually found not guilty, despite being tried before an all-white, all-male jury.

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A military maxim holds that one should never reinforce failure. Part of being a leader is being able to recognize when something is not working and then to take steps to cut losses and move in a different direction. In late 1959, King did just that. In an internal memo, he began edging away from voter registration. “While the voting drive still holds a significant place in our total program, we must not neglect other important areas,” he wrote, a bit stiffly. “Therefore, I recommend that we begin thinking of some of the other areas that should gain our immediate attention.” Opportunities were out there, but it wasn’t clear precisely where. Another part of being a leader is biding one’s time and waiting for the situation to develop.

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James Lawson, a veteran practitioner of nonviolent protest who had been jailed during the Korean War for declining to cooperate with draft laws, refusing even to seek a student exemption. Asked on a conscription form about his race, Lawson had recorded that his was “human.” After serving eleven months in prison, Lawson had moved to India to study Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance and consider how it might be applied to the United States. He was the young American who had read about the Montgomery bus boycott in the Nagpur newspaper. He then returned to the United States to complete his studies at Oberlin.

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Extending that invitation to Lawson to come south may have been the most historic thing King did during these years. Lawson soon would inject a new energy into the wandering movement. Heeding King’s call, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled at the divinity school at Vanderbilt University, which had begun admitting a handful of Black students a few years earlier, and only at some of its graduate schools. Lawson began his civil rights work in Nashville not with a…

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The civil rights movement was often creative, but it was rarely spontaneous. Its members did not just take to the streets to see what would happen. Rather, weeks and even months of planning and preparation went into most of its campaigns. Lawson set the example by taking his time. Diane Nash, a Fisk University student who became one of Lawson’s most effective trainees, later explained, “The first step was investigation, where we really did all the necessary research and analysis to totally understand the problem. The second phase was education, where we educated our own constituency to what we had found out in our research. The third stage was negotiation, where you really approached the opposition, let them know your position.” Only then would come marches, sit-ins, or other forms of demonstration. “The purpose of demonstrations,” Nash explained, “was to focus the attention of the community on the issue, and on the injustice.” This would be coupled with…

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Every military leader knows that intense training is essential to everything that follows, playing a large role in whether an organization fails or succeeds. The more rigorous and realistic the training, the better. The ancient historian Josephus wrote of the Roman army, “Their exercises lack none of the vigor of true war, but each soldier trains every day with his whole heart as if it were war indeed.… He…

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The civil rights movement paid close attention to training as well. It was in lectures, discussions, and role-playing sessions that the philosophy of nonviolence was imparted. Those sessions prepared new volunteers for the ugly violence many would endure, and also made them familiar with the overall strategy of the Movement. Indeed, a 1934 book by the Gandhi disciple Richard Gregg concluded with two full chapters on training. Gregg’s work was influential in the Movement. King…

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Gregg wrote that the ideal size for a group being trained is no more than a dozen. “When there are more than twelve, it is very difficult to have free, active and steady discussion,” he observed. He had settled on an interesting number, one familiar to every soldier. In modern infantry units, squads are usually made up of eleven to thirteen people. Smaller than that, and the group becomes vulnerable when…

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Gregg endorsed the analogy between nonviolent actions and combat operations because he thought that many of the same behaviors and techniques that humans had developed over thousands of years to wage war could be repurposed for nonviolence. He wrote, “The nonviolent resister will, like soldiers, need courage, self-respect, patience, endurance and the ability to sacrifice himself for a cause.”

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Done right, a thoughtful training program also will identify potential new leaders—the soldiers who learn fast, show persistence and self-discipline, and are able to help others.

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The Nashville civil rights movement is particularly striking for its development of leaders. Out of its initial small group of about forty or fifty students grew a cadre of people who would become a major force in the civil rights effort—first in sit-ins, then in the Freedom Rides, then in forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then in the Birmingham marches, and finally in Selma. In addition to Diane Nash, this group included John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard LaFayette, Jr., and Marion Barry.

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Lawson believed that he could turn the city into “a laboratory for demonstrating nonviolence,” and that doing so could plant the seeds for “many Montgomerys.” He set to work, conducting on March 26, 1958, the first of what he called “workshops” but the American military would call intense training and indoctrination. These took place on Tuesday nights, Saturday mornings, and Sunday evenings in church basements, at first with about ten participants, none of them students. But in the fall of 1958, students began to participate, and the workshop group doubled.

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The purpose of the workshops, explained Lawson, was to train people so that when conducting an action, they would coordinate their approach with an understanding of the ultimate goal. “You have to have a common discipline when you have twenty-five people on a protest,” he said. “A protest cannot be spontaneous. It has to be systematic. There must be planning, strategy.” What Lawson called “a common discipline” is known in the U.S. military as “doctrine.”

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John Lewis, a bright but awkward son of Alabama sharecroppers who had been puzzled as a boy that he was not allowed to set foot in his town’s public library. “Those Tuesday nights … became the focus of my life, more important even than my classes,” Lewis recalled. “It was something I’d been searching for my whole life.” He was a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary, which trained Black ministers. Tuition cost him $42 a semester. To help pay that bill, Lewis worked part-time as a dishwasher and then as a janitor at the college.

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used it, and returned it with a word of gratitude. Bevel was astonished, thinking to himself, “He thanked the man who spat on him for letting him use his damn handkerchief?” Lawson said that the act was so simple yet so profound that it disarmed the attacker. “That amazed me,” Bevel recalled. “At the same time it felt like lights going on. The possibilities and the uses of nonviolence became instantly apparent.” Bevel himself went overnight from skeptic to devotee. Never one for half measures, he visited the Nashville Public Library and left carrying every book it had by or about Gandhi.

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For the first time in his life, Lewis saw white and Black people cooking, eating, and cleaning together. He also got some advice in workshops about not letting older people take over their embryonic movement. He was especially impressed by Septima Clark, the regal woman running the workshop. “I left Highlander on fire,” he would write years

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Long before the U.S. Army discovered the value of an all-volunteer force, the civil rights movement lived by it. In particular, one of those recruits, James Bevel, later observed that there was a particular type of person who made a valuable addition to the nonviolent movement: “They have a sense of rightness, fair play and justice about them. They have open hearts and minds. They listen.”

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Determined, attractive, and stylish, Nash had grown up in Chicago. In September 1959, when she enrolled at Fisk, she was surprised to encounter rigorous legal segregation for the first time. Angry and frustrated, she heard about the workshops on nonviolent protest that Lawson was conducting. She was taken with them. She also was taken with Bevel, and eventually would marry him. As a couple, they would become a Movement powerhouse, greatly influencing the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma. The theory and practice of nonviolence

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The first step in the workshops was to explain the theory and philosophy of nonviolence. The next step was to introduce tactics—how to translate theory into practice. The third was to determine procedures—

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But he emphasized the necessity not to inflict suffering in attacking it and instead to take suffering upon oneself. “When you don’t retaliate with a personal insult, but instead offer a friendly gesture,” Lawson explained, “that’s what Jesus meant when he said, ‘turn the other cheek.’ You cause the other person to do searching.” Accepting suffering changed not only the person experiencing it but also those inflicting it, and even those witnessing the interaction.

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So, Lawson taught, the first principle of nonviolent resistance was this: “We will not injure you, but we will absorb your injury of us because the cycle of violence must be broken. And if we respond to your violence with violence, then all you do is escalate the violence. We want the cycle of violence in America and racism stopped. So we will take it on ourselves, we will not dish it out in kind.” The essential action was to look your attacker in the eye and try to register with him as a fellow human being, and to see him the same way. Lawson said if that seemed difficult, then imagine the assailant as a baby who had not yet learned the ways of segregation and hatred.

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The corollary to this practical application of nonviolent theory was that one must never be passive about absorbing violence. An attack required a response, albeit a nonviolent one. “When the enemies proceed to do violence against us,” Lawson said, “we must not let their violence stop our movement.” That, he added, became “a kind of a cardinal notion in the Movement all across the South.” The idea was to take the release of destructive energy and recycle it into a positive action. The usage could take a variety of forms—a march, a boycott, a general strike, and so on. But it became…

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Once the basic principles had been imparted, the volunteers would begin to practice their roles. In evening sessions, they sat at long tables, pretending they were at lunch counters, and submitted themselves to the abuse of others playing the role of harassing whites. Nonviolence meant far more than simply not responding when hit. It was an entire way of thinking about the world. Workshop participants learned, recalled one volunteer, C. T. Vivian, how to “take the blows,” not just physically but mentally. “The fact that you were…

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Another technique, said Diane Nash, involved how to protect a fellow protester: “If one person was taking a severe beating, we would practice other people putting their bodies in between that person and the violence. So that the violence could be more distributed and hopefully no one would get seriously injured. We would practice not striking back, if someone struck us.” After each role-playing session, Lawson…

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These workshops were not purely tactical. Nash, who would go on to play a major role first in the Freedom Rides and later in shaping Movement strategy, also learned something deeper in Lawson’s classes. “There were several principles that I learned in those workshops that I’ve been able to really use in the rest of my life,” she said. “For example, I discovered that practical and real power of truth and love.… I’ve gained a respect for truth, not because it has anything to do with being good, or right, or anything, but it is being in touch with reality.” Here Nash illuminates the basic lesson that good strategy-making must begin with a clear-eyed, honest assessment of the situation. If one’s understanding is mistaken, whether by accepting false information or through self-deception, everything that follows will be corrupted by that misstep. This insight…

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Instead, in November and December 1959, he dispatched students in threes and fours to conduct informal dry runs, just sitting down at lunch counters in downtown Nashville and seeing what happened. They would report back to the larger group on what they had sensed about the physical setup and the attitude of the waitresses and managers. These were the equivalent of military scouting parties, and indeed Lawson was thinking in those exact terms. He recalled that these early forays and subsequent discussions were “part of a focusing in, that places were going to be our targets down the road.” The trips downtown made the sit-ins more real to those who would participate—they could picture the ground on which they would fight.…

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on. Bernard LaFayette summarized his preparation this way: “We had a nonviolent academy equivalent to West Point. We knew how to organize a community…

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Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. It was an electrifying experience, said one of those Greensboro protesters, Franklin McCain. “If it is possible to know what it is like to have your soul cleansed,” he recalled, “I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt in my life.” Gandhi would not have been surprised by that reaction. To be ready to die for what one held to be true was a chance to live fully, he taught. Gandhi believed that the divine manifested…

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Had Till lived, he would have been of college age in 1960. Sellers said, “I think the first real impact on me as a student, and many of the other students of my age, was Emmett Till.… I think it became very clear to us that there was something incessant in American society,… that it had the potential for killing children.” Similarly, Junius Williams, who termed himself a “grunt” in SNCC, said decades later, “The picture of Emmett Till sticks in my mind now.… I could just picture myself in that same situation.… That was one of the sparks that really lit the Civil Rights Movement in a lot of people’s hearts.”

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“There was no stopping this thing now,” recalled Bevel’s friend John Lewis. “We were young, free and burning with belief—the perfect foot soldiers for an assault like this.” Indeed, Lewis would become like a dedicated infantryman for the Movement, one who “traveled constantly and … traveled light,”

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Finally, Lawson had prepared his cadre for a long effort. This would not be a matter of a few demonstrations or marches, he told them. As he would put it later, “Protracted struggle is a moral struggle that is like warfare, moral warfare. I don’t like using that language, but it means that tension is in the air, disruption is in the air, that a lot of people think that their lives have been unduly interrupted.” Here Lawson was touching on a fundamental fact that still is insufficiently recognized: by challenging the established order in novel and unexpected ways that confounded and baffled officials, practitioners of nonviolent tactics could be extraordinarily aggressive.

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He deployed 124 students to three downtown lunch counters, in the stores of Woolworth’s, S. H. Kress, and McLellan’s Five-and-Dime. They were the civil rights equivalent of paratroopers—an elite force of volunteers, well trained and highly motivated, stealthily dropping in on unsuspecting targets. Lawson reminded the students to follow their training, warning that failing to do would undercut the entire effort. A leader appointed for each group would speak for it, and also keep an eye on those under his or her wing. In groups that were mainly Black but usually had one or two white students, they slipped into the lunchrooms, sat down, and politely asked for service. They simply wanted to be served at the lunch counters in the stores where they shopped. But, as the saying had it, they were asking…

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Lawson deployed observers with instructions for them to stay at the edge of each protest. Their primary tasks were to keep a detailed running account of what was happening, to send information back to headquarters via runners, and to call the police when mobs attacked protesters, which would deprive the authorities of the excuse that no one told them. But the presence of informed observers also may have encouraged those sitting in to follow their training. Lawson related, “We had white people who stayed in the background and out of place but kept an eye on what was going on, so if we needed to have court witnesses and information and a whole lot of other things, we had it in place…

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“What are y’all doing here?” Receiving absolutely no response, the hecklers left, a vindication of Lawson’s approach and training. At another store, Diane Nash recalled, an odd moment occurred when two of the women sitting in went to the women’s room. While they were there, an older white woman opened the door, saw…

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Tennessee State University. Remaining low-key and following the rules, Lillard responded, “Sir, do you have a handkerchief?” The man began to reach for his pocket, then caught himself and said, “Hell, no.” But Lillard felt that for…

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feeling essential to maintaining the morale of those on the front lines. “When they knocked me out of the chair and spit on me and drug me, I was prepared for that because I’d been trained day in and day out,” recalled one participant, Joe Goldthreate. Thorough training makes people feel they can handle whatever…

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Five days later, the number of students nearly doubled, to two hundred, and they were able to include a fourth establishment, Grants. Then, on February 20, Lawson fielded more than three hundred sit-in participants. White patrons of the stores began to complain. The ministers in the Nashville Christian Leadership…

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Because the numbers were increasing, and some of the volunteers were newcomers who had not received Lawson’s thorough training, the studious and serious John Lewis wrote up a list of basic demonstration rules to be followed. Because Lewis worked as a janitor in his seminary, he had the keys that enabled him to slip into an office and mimeograph them. DO NOT: Strike back nor curse if abused. Laugh out. Hold conversations with floor walker. Leave your seat until your leader has given you permission to do so. Block entrances to stores outside nor the aisles inside. DO: Show yourself friendly and courteous at all times. Sit straight; always face the counter. Report all serious incidents to your leader. Refer information seekers to your leader in a polite manner. Remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Love and nonviolence is the way.

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The sudden and total withdrawal left the protesters vulnerable to waiting white mobs, which were behaving just as Lawson had taught they would—spitting, jabbing, heckling. It is always reassuring when one’s training is validated by real events in the field, even when those events are threatening. It gives participants faith in their leaders and their instructions.

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that the white youths began “insulting us, blowing smoke in our faces, grinding out cigarette butts on our backs, and finally, pulling us off our stools and beating us. Those of us pulled off our stools tried to regain them as soon as possible. But none of us attempted to fight back in any way.” The students sitting with him followed their instructions and did not turn around, but in the long mirror they faced, they could see the fists flying downward against LaPrad, being pummeled on the…

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But the students’ next move flummoxed the police. When the first set of protesters had been hauled away, another wave, notified by observers and runners, moved in to take their places. Lawson here was following the nonviolent equivalent of the military’s “concentration of force.” That time-honored principle is based on the recognition that troops can’t be strong everywhere but can focus on one spot, outnumber the enemy there, and hit repeatedly. One nineteenth-century military analyst summarized the thought as follows: “The principle should always be kept in view, that the power of most rapid concentration upon the decisive point is the guarantee to victory.” Perhaps the most famous example is the German military’s use at the beginning of World War II…

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So, rather than dispersing his students across the downtown, which would make it harder for him to monitor and easier for the citywide police force to counter, Lawson brought them together. After the second set of arrests, Lawson sent in a third wave. “No matter what they did and how many they arrested, there was still a lunch counter full of students, there,” Nash recalled. “It was interesting to watch their response.… They didn’t quite know how to act.” Indeed, when the police had arrested about eighty students, they stopped, likely because the jail’s intake system was…

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inversion: The protesters welcomed jail. This is worth pausing to consider, because it represented a fundamental cultural shift. White bystanders were surprised to see the students who were being put in paddy wagons singing as they shuffled along. They seemed elated. This was a decisive moment for the protesters. Lawson had taught that redemption and freedom came from directly challenging an evil system, refusing to cooperate with it any longer. Being jailed for…

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One of those arrested on Big Saturday was John Lewis. “[It] was the first time that I was arrested, and growing up in the rural South … it would bring shame and disgrace on the family,” he recalled. It was also dangerous: In the Deep South, it was common for police to beat arrested Blacks. Those who protested or even fought back were deemed “uppity”—that is, insufficiently submissive—and sometimes turned over to lynch mobs or simply killed by the police. As Dr. William Anderson, a civil rights activist in southwestern Georgia, would put it, “There were many Blacks who were arrested in small…

Ref. 037E-V

With those fourscore of arrests on Saturday, “The social terrain had now begun to shift dramatically,” comments Barry Lee, one of the best chroniclers of the sit-in movement. Lewis and others had been taught that only bad people were locked up. Now he and others were volunteering to do so. It was, concludes Lee, a decisive generational discontinuity, signaling the beginning of the breakup of the glacier of fear that had gripped southern Blacks for decades and centuries. As James Lawson had taught, “If you dare to pray such prayers … then you…

Ref. 13D3-W

opportunity. They organized their days with set periods for sermons, lectures, and quiet time. For the seminarians among them, it brought to mind the acts of the Christians of the first century. “We created our own church services,” said C. T. Vivian. It became a bonding experience for those behind bars. This was a major lesson, learned in the relatively benign atmosphere of the Nashville city jail. It would help some…

Ref. 4D7B-X

When assigned to shovel snow on city sidewalks, the jailed protesters threw themselves into it enthusiastically and then requested more work. Gandhi mandated that the nonviolent prisoner should show a “cheerful acceptance of jail discipline and its attendant hardships” so that “by his exemplary conduct he reforms even the criminals surrounding him, he softens the hearts of jailors and others in authority.” When they were finally released, recalled…

Ref. 75C2-Y

personal results. In Nashville’s Black community, the moral burden shifted to those who were not locked up. Where had they been, and what were they doing to help change the situation? Such questions helped attract Black adults to the cause. Persuaded that the students were serious, and willing to take risks, Nashville’s adults began to make more donations to the NCLC. Flem Otey’s grocery store sent sandwiches to the jail. In military terms, this was a “rallying,” a process of encouraging allies to come forward. It was at this point, concludes the historian Benjamin Houston, that the sit-ins…

Ref. 46D8-Z

Further damaging Nashville’s image, the footage of the beating of LaPrad, the white student from Fisk, had been broadcast on national television. “It marked one of the earliest instances where Americans were shown firsthand the kind of anger and ugliness that the peaceful movement was prompting in the South,” wrote John Lewis. Lewis didn’t say so in that passage, but the outcry over the image of that assault instructed movement leaders in an unhappy truth about the country: Americans responded much more vigorously to seeing white protesters being beaten than they did to seeing similar suffering among Blacks. It was a severe but realistic lesson that the Movement would apply repeatedly in the following years.

Ref. 0D3B-A

However, he used it to denounce the students as criminals. Lawson responded that “where the law was used simply to oppress people, then it wasn’t really a law,” because it was neither just nor Christian.

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what they were up against. The expulsion of Lawson resulted in a wave of faculty protests and denunciations from universities across the country, damaging Vanderbilt’s national reputation, which was valuable to Nashville’s establishment. More than half the faculty of the divinity school threatened to resign. Ultimately, the university offered to reinstate Lawson while removing the dean of divinity, an outcome Lawson rejected as equally unacceptable. The mishandling of Lawson ultimately provoked the American Association of Theological…

Ref. A60E-C

also of Martin Luther King, Jr. “It was essential to keep the sit-ins and the prospect of direct action within proportion. The students were young, committed and valiant, but they were not organized,” he wrote. Those last two words were both incorrect and dismissive. Wilkins was more accurate in his assessment of the future: “They would have no staying power beyond a few short years’ time. My own experiences had taught me that the struggle would still be going on long after they were out of college…

Ref. 6C3C-D

The problem with the NAACP’s approach of working mainly through the courts to gain access to graduate and professional education was that it was both incremental and remote from the concerns of most Blacks. The NAACP’s lawyers had challenged “separate but equal” public education for nineteen years before finally succeeding, massively, in 1954. They had begun in the 1930s by chipping away at segregation in law schools in states such as Maryland and Missouri, and then went after such schools in Texas, Louisiana, and other states. Generally, write the historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “direct action did not form a significant part of NAACP tactics.” The NAACP’s wary approach, focused on the courts and legislatures, probably was the best way, and perhaps the only way, that progress could be made against official American racism at that time. But strategically it was a problem, because the focus on professional educational opportunities for African Americans on the periphery of the South meant that its efforts were quite distant from the everyday lives and immediate concerns of most Black Americans. And, as King noted…

Ref. 7993-E

Even Thurgood Marshall, who led the NAACP’s legal crusade, found the process wearing. He once told the psychologist Kenneth Clark, his academic ally, “Sometimes I get awfully…

Ref. E7BA-F

James Baldwin, probably the most important writer of the time, captured the situation when he wrote in 1961 that the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, “reveals the state of mind of the Negro bourgeoisie. The Crisis has the most exciting subject matter in the world at its fingertips, and yet manages to be one of the world’s dullest magazines.” This is not trivial, he insightfully added, “because this dullness is the result of its failure to examine what is really happening in the Negro world.”

Ref. 35D0-G

King responded vehemently: I have refused to fight back or even answer some of the unkind statements that I have been informed that NAACP officials said about me and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Frankly, I hear these statements every day, and I have seen efforts on the part of NAACP officials to sabotage our efforts. But I have never said anything about it publicly or to the press.

Ref. 2171-H

“This is a new stage in the struggle,” Levison stated. “It begins at the higher point where Montgomery left off.” The students, he added, in what appears to be a direct critique of the NAACP, “by example are demonstrating the bankruptcy of the policy…

Ref. 292F-I

movement would be based in its heartland. The Montgomery bus boycott, of course, had taken place in the first capital of the Confederacy. The Freedom Rides would cut across the South and terminate in the capital of Mississippi, the hardest state in the region. The Birmingham campaign would tackle the hardest city in Alabama, and Freedom Summer would challenge the entire obdurate state of Mississippi. What’s more, these efforts had an immediacy that…

Ref. BE57-J

The Nashville student demonstrators were in fact creating their own liberation—and in the process, many were experiencing profound personal transformations, discovering a new sense of self-confidence. “The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there, like courage, and love for people,” said Diane Nash. “It was a real experience, to be among a group of people who would put their bodies between…

Ref. 92BC-K

Military specialists would recognize this phenomenon as “unit cohesion,” strongest when tested in the crucible of combat. Cohesion is more than a helpful thing for a unit to have; it is essential to maintaining combat effectiveness. Cohesion reflects the presence of deep trust, which results in both short- and long-term benefits. Its presence tends to ease decision-making and communication, enabling a unit to operate with greater speed and impact. Remarkably, soldiers…

Ref. CE70-L

their course and were considering their follow-on actions. “The students managed to move so fast that other forces in the community couldn’t keep up with us,” Nash recalled. At another point she said, “We just moved so…

Ref. EEAB-M

Lawson also taught them that after each action, the participants should gather and discuss what happened: What had worked? What hadn’t? Why? Would there have been better ways to handle a problem? What should we try next time? He referred to this reflection and analysis as an effort “to keep the movement as creative as possible.” The U.S. Army, which has a similar process, calls this sort of session an “After-Action Review.” It leads to tactical adaptation, which is essential, because if a foe…

Ref. 7A71-N

Gregg’s 1934 manual on nonviolence taught that singing together was a primary way of developing unity. And, he noted, it cost nothing and required no equipment. Oddly, with the exception of words chanted while running or marching in boot camp, at the very beginning of military careers, modern…

Ref. D7F7-O

The NAACP was less impressed. Thurgood Marshall, its star lawyer, would publicly call C. T. Vivian “the most dangerous man in all Nashville.” Marshall did not mean it as a compliment. He was worried that sit-ins and other direct actions by Blacks would be provocative but unproductive, and also might alienate the courts, which he considered the best ally of Black

Ref. 9222-P

As the historian Anthony Siracusa puts it, “While a series of legal shifts seemed to remove chinks from the armor of Jim Crow, Lawson suggested that the limits of legal change were real and acute.” All in all, the comment made Marshall look truculent, and it reflected the condescending father-knows-best attitude that the NAACP often would tend to take with newer civil rights organizations. Another move later would underscore the NAACP’s skepticism about Lawson and nonviolence: King wanted to hire Lawson to work for the SCLC, but Roy Wilkins threatened to retaliate against the SCLC if he did. King dropped the idea.

Ref. 31EA-Q

As for the Nashville students, many went on to become the core cadres of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was formed in April 1960, with the strong encouragement of the SCLC’s Ella Baker, and soon became one of the foremost organizations in the civil rights movement. Several early SNCC leaders also would move on to roles in the SCLC.

Ref. A159-R

“This movement is not only against segregation,” he stated. “It’s against Uncle Tom Negroes, against the NAACP’s over-reliance on the courts, and against the futile middle-class technique of sending letters to the centers of power.” Rather, he said, it was dedicated to carrying out a “nonviolent revolution.” The NAACP’s leaders would not be pleased by this critique.

Ref. 4106-S

As Lawson indicated, the Movement’s operations had much in common with an insurgent force. Its leaders were directly involved, staring both friend and foe in the face. They recruited people, trained them, and sent them out into the field. They were taken captive, interrogated, and beaten. They met to discuss strategy and map out future efforts. They planned and led marches. They conducted operations in which there were rarely front lines, which meant that there were few genuinely safe places where one could relax—a situation that dramatically increases stress. Visiting their offices in Alabama and Mississippi, wrote Howard Zinn, a sympathetic historian, was like visiting combat outposts.

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