The Nashville Lesson

In sympathy for the Freedom Riders, 24 students (four of them white) from Tennessee colleges last week picketed Nashville's bus terminal. They carried the now familiar placards (DEMOCRACY AND SEGREGATION DON'T Mix). But the demonstration was purely symbolic. As the students well knew, the Nashville terminal had been integrated for months without fanfare or violence.

In similarly silent fashion, integration has come to Nashville's schools, to its department-store lunch counters, downtown theaters, golf courses, libraries, and airport. Although located in a border state, Nashville is in many senses a Deep South city. It is not necessarily a placid place. Says a race-relations worker who has long traveled throughout the South: "Nashville can be the nastiest town I've ever seen." But Nashville (pop. 170,000) has unexpectedly taken its place in the vanguard of Southern integration.

Nashville calls itself the "Athens of the South." It has twelve universities and colleges, including Vanderbilt ("the Princeton of the South") and Fisk University ("the Ivy League of Southern Negro colleges"). It has Protestant churches of all sorts and sects, and it has . more than its share of social-and racial-relations groups, led by the Nashville Community Relations Conference, an organization of some 400 citizens dedicated to "equal justice under the law, and a true brotherhood of man." If Nashville's white merchants remain segregationists at heart, they have at least learned to become pocketbook integrationists.

These white-led groups have all contributed to Nashville's transition. But if any one person deserves major credit it is, by general agreement, a Negro: the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, 40, hulking (6 ft. 1 in., 200 lbs.) pastor of Nashville's First Baptist Church. Says a Nashville merchant with whom Smith successfully negotiated a settlement of Nashville's lunch-counter sit-in strikes: "The mayor didn't have anything to do with it. The ministers didn't have anything to do with it. The community relations people didn't have anything to do with it. But Kelly Miller Smith is as honorable a man as I've ever met."

Smith helped smooth the integration of Nashville's public schools, which had got off to a rock-throwing, bomb-hurling start. Today, some 180 Negro students attend nine formerly all-white schools, and the number increases--almost unnoticed--each year. Again, last year, when Nashville's lunch-counter sit-ins caused violence, it was Smith who led Negro negotiations with white merchants. He had a powerful lever. Says a department-store official of the lunch-counter settlement that resulted: "Sure, our lunch-counter business has dropped slightly from what it used to be. But it's nothing like the business we lost during the Negro boycott. We're doing fine." In the lunch-counter fight as in others since, it was Smith's willingness to achieve progress in fact, rather than seek headline victories, that made the quiet but vital difference.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.