Content Background
March by Andrew Aydin, John Lewis, and Nate Powell will serve as the anchor text to the study of the Civil Rights Movement. March is a graphic novel trilogy. It combined John Lewis’ memoir on the Civil Rights Movement, Walking with the Wind, with his experience as an elder statesman during the Obama presidency. March: Book One focused on Lewis’ childhood in Alabama and ended with the Nashville Student Movement’s efforts in forcing lunch counter integration. March: Book Two and March: Book Three covered the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery Marches, the Civil Rights Act, and Voting Rights Act. March showed that the movement was more than just a handful of leaders. It was a movement of hundreds of unnamed people.
Why Teach History?
This unit will incorporate methods used by historian Sam Wineburg to teach history. In 2006, Wineburg, Abby Reisman, and other Stanford researchers piloted a program to teach historical thinking in an urban setting.8 Historical thinking goes beyond memorizing dates and facts from a textbook. It encourages students to look at history at its sources.
Primary documents and accounts often create conflicting realities. This conflict requires students to make sense of the past. The primary accounts of the colonial settler John Smith showcase this conflict. Smith wrote two accounts of his encounter with Pocahontas and the Powhatan Confederacy. His first account from 1608 described Chief Powhatan as welcoming. He did not mention any threat to his life. His account from 1628 described Pocahontas as saving him from Chief Powhatan9 In a span of twenty years, Smith’s account of his first encounter changed from friendly to life-and-death. Why would John Smith write two inconsistent accounts? Instead of being told what happened, students must uncover history for themselves. This change in method transforms their role from passive to active as they research and interpret history.
In Why Teach History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), Wineburg emphasized the contextualization of documents and events by asking questions such as: What bibliographic information is provided with a source? How or why was a document created? What does it tell us about the perspective of people in the past and why events happened when they did?10 This method of historical thinking will encourage students to make sense of conflicting accounts.
John Lewis and the Nashville Student Movement
Congressperson John Lewis was a major figure of the Civil Rights Movement. He was involved in many key events including the March on Washington. He died in July of 2020. The same month, John Lewis: Good Trouble was released. The retrospective documentary celebrated his life. The film showed his willingness to put himself on the line for freedom even when it met arrest and physical harm. Since his death, he has received an almost saint-like elevation that can be seen in the christening of the United States Naval Ship John Lewis or Democrats naming new voting rights legislation after him.11
March begins by focusing on Lewis’ childhood. John Lewis was born in Troy, Alabama in 1940. His family worked as sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South.12 1955 was a watershed moment for Lewis. Massive Resistance, the organized effort by southern whites to block integration, dashed hopes for a better school experience promised by Brown v. Board. The brutal murder of Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old, by white vigilantes shook him to the core. The gospel of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott inspired him beyond the constraints of his hometown.13 His experiences as a distant witness to these events highlight the anonymity that many people feel when facing the inequality of the American Dream versus the perception of him as a revered freedom fighter. Injustices from institutionalized racism in Lewis’ youth in the mid-1950s draw parallels to injustices students witness today.
Lewis entered American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee on a work-study scholarship in 1957.14 He joined a growing group of students that studied the philosophy of non-violence. The group intended to start a sit-in campaign in Nashville.15
Students in Greensboro sparked the sit-in movement nationally on February 1st, 1960. Less than two weeks after the Greensboro sit-ins, Nashville students began their campaign.16 The Nashville community was unprepared for the first day of sit-ins. The protestors were not met with violence. Businesses closed and members of the Nashville Student Movement convened in a church to celebrate. In the days that followed, the response from the community grew violent. The students were met with verbal harassment and physical beatings. Police intervened by arresting the nonviolent student protestors. They did not arrest white people that assaulted the students.17
Nationally, the sit-in movement created friction within the Black community. Many university presidents of Black institutions privately discouraged the direct action of the sit-in movement.18 The sit-in movement from Greensboro to Nashville surprised more established groups like the NAACP. It was an unconstrained, grassroots social movement led by students.19 Thurgood Marshall, the lead attorney in Brown v. Board, spoke to the Nashville students in April of 1960. He discouraged them from some of their tactics.20 Regardless, the Nashville Student Movement gained support of leaders in the local Black community.21
Tensions surrounding the Nashville sit-ins culminated with the bombing of a sit-in supporter’s home on April 19th of 1960. In response, 2,000 people marched to Nashville’s City Hall.22 The mayor of Nashville placated the protestors with promises. Actual government intervention was minimal. The mayor recommended lunch counter integration but did not enforce it.23 Six of the downtown Nashville restaurants agreed to integrate.24 The integration of the restaurants marked a success for the Nashville Student Movement.25 However, the final pages of March showed continued resistance to members of the Nashville Student Movement as they expanded their campaign.26 March: Book One ended without resolution.
John Lewis marked the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a turning point for the movement. March closed the Civil Rights Movement at its traditional end in the 1960s. However, it used flash forward to join it to the 21st century. Ending the book during Obama’s presidency connected Lewis’ time as a congressperson to the Civil Rights Movement. March made sense of the present through its presentation of the past. It showed the interconnectedness of social movements that seem disjointed by our memory and the distance of time.
The Richmond sit-in movement
Students at Virginia Union University began Richmond’s sit-in movement on February 20th, 1960.27 The Richmond Times-Dispatch documented the non-violent protests led by Virginia Union University students and the community response. The businesses affected by the sit-ins closed. White youth, with rebel hats and waving Confederate flags, harassed the Black student protestors. The president of Virginia Union University, Dr. Samuel Proctor, publicly supported the nonviolent protests of the students. White groups like the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties called for their arrests.28 Richmond was caught off guard. The responses of businesses and the white community matched the first-day responses in Nashville of nonplussed businesses hastily closing because of the nonviolent sit-ins.
The Virginia Union University students continued their sit-in protests. They received front page coverage when police arrested 34 of them on February 22nd, 1960. Thalhimers, a downtown department store targeted by the Black students, prepared statements after the first day of the protest. Thalhimers warned the students that their trespass would lead to arrest. When the students refused to move, police on standby moved in and arrested the students. The students that participated in the sit-in at Thalhimers became known as the Richmond 34. Two female protestors stated white citizens spat on them. Another protestor was scalded with hot coffee. Overall, the community response in Richmond was not as violent as it was in Nashville.29
The response across the state included the introduction of a bill to allow for harsher punishment towards sit-in protestors. Similar protests occurred in cities like Norfolk, Virginia.30 Two Richmond Times-Dispatch editorials criticized the sit-ins. One supported racial discrimination in legal terms. It argued that the sit-in protesters were breaking the law by trespassing. The editorial stated that private businesses were not subject to court rulings like Brown v. Board. The second argued white people carried a burden to elevate Black Americans from “below serfdom” to a rate of literacy “largely considered impossible a century ago.”31 It described the sit-in supporters as agitators that felt the “white man owes him everything.” The editorial closed with a warning to not force freedom of association.32 These editorials reflected racist attitudes common among white people in the United States. They resented the Black students for challenging the system of segregation that they sought to maintain. They failed to account for white people’s role in slavery, the illiteracy of Black Americans, and other historic forms of oppression. Though white Americans in Richmond were less violent than in Nashville, they wanted the same racist status quo.
Absent from the Richmond Times-Dispatch coverage was the most well-known picture taken in Richmond. The nonviolent protests in Richmond garnered some national attention with the arrest of Ruth Tinsley. Ruth Tinsley was the wife of NAACP director, Dr. Jesse Tinsley. She was supporting the students along with other protestors outside of Thalhimers. The photograph captured two police officers with a police dog carrying away an elderly Tinsley.33 People who see the image often describe her as being dragged by police. The editorial decision not to include this picture was likely intentional as it would have garnered sympathy.
In contrast to the local white-owned papers, the Richmond Afro American articles and editorials cast the sit-in in a favorable manner. Coverage on the front page of the Richmond Afro American announced the location and time of a meeting to support the sit-in movement.34 Additional articles identified supporters of the sit-in movement including a small group of white people, the Black community, and the Afro American editorial board.35 The two papers showed the divergence of perspective within the Richmond community.
The sit-ins sparked the Campaign for Human Dignity, which virtually ended segregation in Richmond in 1961. The campaign included a boycott, picketing, and other forms of protests to spur integration. Although there was no direct government intervention, most local businesses desegregated.36
Like many other papers in the 21st century, the Richmond Times-Dispatch issued an apology for its role in Massive Resistance.37 In 2010, the paper looked back on the sit-in movement fifty years earlier. The article featured an interview with the granddaughter of the owner of Thalhimers, one of the businesses targeted by the Richmond 34. She stated that her grandfather knew segregation was wrong but speculated that he did not integrate because of the economic clout of his white clientele.38 These various primary and secondary sources highlight the significance of the sit-in movement and the complexity of narratives within a segregated society.
Richmond Today
The George Floyd protests connected to Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement more broadly.39 Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall described the mass spread of television as thrusting the Civil Rights Movement “out of nowhere." For many white Americans, the scenes from the Civil Rights Movement and the 2020 summer uprising were without precedent.40 However, events from the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement connected to prior movements including the end of segregation in the military in 1948.41 Protests like the Ferguson protests that began because of the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014 preceded the 2020 George Floyd protests.42 Remembering either the Civil Rights Movement or the George Floyd protest in an ahistorical manner removes them from broader movements against institutional racism.
There are major differences from the nonviolent protests of the sit-in movement to the George Floyd protests, but the connections are worth noting. For example, the protests over the summer of 2020 were often led by young people similar in age to the student protestors during the sit-in movement. The George Floyd protests drew for calls of restraint from more established groups just as leaders in the NAACP called for restraint of students like John Lewis during the Nashville Student Movement.43 All these movements responded to institutionalized racism manifest in police brutality. “I Have a Dream” specifically referenced police brutality stating Black people were “the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”44
These various social movements resulted in advances while exposing unresolved inequity. The George Floyd protests sparked investigations into police departments and forced some localities like Los Angeles to shift funding from police to other services. In general, the socioeconomic demands of the Civil Rights Movement and the George Floyd protests have not been met.45 Formal equality does not address underlying conditions that cause inequity. De facto segregation has left society more segregated today than it was in the late 1960s.46 The unfulfilled components from these movements measured alongside their successes affirm that we must “forego easy closure and satisfying upward or downward arcs.”47
After the murder of George Floyd protestors gathered in Richmond. They protested for weeks and made several demands to address local reforms. Protestors’ various demands included an assessment of the police budget in Richmond, the removal of police in schools, the establishment of a civilian review board for police oversight, and the removal of Confederate statues.48 Richmond activists have seen minimal progress that mirrors the immediate outcomes of the Nashville Student Movement.
Almost a year after the protests, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney wrote an op-ed in The New York Times. He framed himself as moving the city past the protests by apologizing for the unintentional use of tear gas on peaceful protestors. Richmond police launched tear gas into a crowd of protestors that had gathered around the largest Confederate monument in the city. The event took place in broad daylight. The use of teargas appeared to be unprovoked and was covered extensively by the local media. The mayor cited his subsequent decisions to remove Confederate statues as a resolution.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch fact-checked the mayor’s NYT op-ed. It quoted locals that accused the mayor of simplifying the narrative to portray himself as a hero. The journalist refuted several unsubstantiated claims the mayor made in his op-ed.49 By the time the city started to remove statues, several had been taken down by protestors. Additionally, the police intentionally used tear gas on peaceful protestors even after the mayor’s public apology for its unintentional use.50
A retrospective piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch examined how most of the demands of the protestors remain deferred.51 Studying the Nashville Student Movement and having our current vantages can help students see the peaks and valleys of social movements. The competing narratives between the mayor’s op-ed and the other primary sources from 2021 show how memory and history are already diverging.
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