Video Segment

Eyes on the Prize, Volume 164, Chapter 1

Table of Contents

Summary
Questions for Discussion
Activities
Keywords
Profiles
Organizations
Maps
Graphs
Primary Documents

Summary

The story opens in 1960, in Nashville, Tennessee, where theaters, hotels, restaurants, and city buses were segregated, and separate provisions for Blacks were inferior. Blacks were allowed to buy merchandise in downtown stores but were refused service at the stores' lunch counters.

After taking workshops in nonviolent direct action, a number of Black college students began a sit-in at the city's downtown lunch counters. Their strategy was to refuse to move until they were served. When one group of students was arrested, a second group was on hand to move in and take their place. The sit-in technique spread to more than sixty southern cities.

In Nashville, Black residents supported the sit-in participants by boycotting downtown stores. Their boycott was highly effective. The mayor of Nashville admitted publicly that discrimination at the lunch establishments was morally wrong, and three weeks later Black customers were served for the first time at formerly all-white lunch counters.

Questions for Discussion

1. What did Diane Nash and the other students do to prepare for the sit-ins? What were they trying to accomplish by sitting-in? How did segregationists react to the demonstrations? How did the police respond? How was sitting-in at a department store supposed to change the United States?

2. Tell what you know about nonviolence as a strategy for protest. How effective was it? Can you think of when it is most effective to use the strategy of nonviolent protest?

Activities

Have students do research and write a paper that compares the student sit-in movement in the United States with the Soweto student uprising in South Africa in 1976. What are the similarities and differences?

Have students imagine they are attending a Black college (e.g., Spelman College or Fisk University) and ask them to list the steps they would need to take to organize a demonstration of fellow students (e.g., how would they frame the issue and convince students of the need to demonstrate, how would they mobilize the students, how would they deal with the college administration if it opposed the demonstration, how would they discuss the issue with students' parents who might have concerns?).

Have students discuss what might have occurred if the students participating in the sit-ins had retaliated against the white mob. What might have happened to the students? To their parents? To others in the local African American community?

Keywords

• boycott
• Jim Crow
• nonviolence
• segregation
• separate-but-equal
• sit-ins

Online Profiles

• Ella Baker
• John Lewis
• Diane Nash
• C.T. Vivian

Organization Descriptions

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Maps

• United States. In 1950 the population of the United States was 134,941,622 White and 15,042,692 Black (approximately 9.5 percent of the population).
• Tennessee (three frames). Capital: Nashville. Population in 1960 was: 2,977,753 White and 586,876 Black. Principal Goods and Crops: chemicals, textiles, books, shoes and paper; livestock, cotton, tobacco and dairy products.

Graphs

• School Desegregation
• Family Income
• Unemployment Rates
• "Cycle of Inequality"

Primary Documents

• Jim Crow Dining Facility
• Plessy Decision Document

Bibliography

See Eyes on the Prize Bibliography

 

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