Four students from North Carolina A&T sit down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ask to be served. This action by David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil ignites a wave of student sit-ins and protests that flash like fire across the South. A fire for justice that no amount of beatings, jails, or fire hoses can extinguish. Within days sit-ins are occurring in dozens of Southern towns, and in the North supporting picket-lines spring up at Woolworth and Kress stores from New York to San Francisco.
Just days after the Greensboro sit-in, students from American Baptist Theologic Seminary, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee A&I begin confronting segregation in Nashville TN. They politely sit at "whites-only" lunch counters and restaurants. They are met with violence, brutality, and arrest. Hundreds are jailed, and thousands march in protests that continue for years.
--from CRMVET.org
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| Jean Wynona Fleming behind bars in the Nashville jail |
The students had been trained to expect violence and to react peacefully. Each had agreed to a set of nonviolent principles based on the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Parish also acknowledged that the scene sometimes became ugly.
"I can remember two or three occasions where it got out of hand, where hecklers came in there and would pick up tulip bulbs from a nearby counter and toss them at them.
"I remember one time when somebody broke an egg over one guy's head and he just let it stream down his face and didn't say a thing or resist or anything."
--from The Jackson Sun
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| Students busted for protesting segregation fill the Nashville jail to overflowing. |
TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2
A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3
WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
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