Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters

On April 19, 1960, students gathered at Kean Hall on the Tennessee A&I campus and marched silently toward City Hall after the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby's home. The campaign needed lawyers and money as well as marchers. Looby's colleagues, Avon Williams among them, represented students arrested in the sit-ins, and in April 1961 the NAACP's new Nashville president, JohnEtta Hayes, created a Freedom Fund to pay the protesters' legal fees. She had walked school children into Fehr Elementary on the first day of desegregation in 1957.

What the plaque says

Desegregating Nashville's Lunch Counters After the pre-dawn bombing of atty. Z. Alexander Looby's home, approx. 3000 civil rights leaders and students from Tenn. St., Fisk, Meharry, American Baptist College, and Pearl High School marched along this route on April 19, 1960, to meet with Mayor Ben West at the courthouse. In response to Diane Nash, a leader of the student sit-ins, the mayor recommended that store owners end segregated lunch counters. On May 10th, under an agreement between black leaders and city merchants, Nashville became the first major southern city, outside of Texas, to begin desegregating its public facilities.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — steps away
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.3 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.5 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.6 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Jubilee Hall — steps away
• Fisk Jubilee Singers — steps away
• Bombing of the Z. Alexander Looby Home — steps away
• The John Wesley Work Home — steps away