Hungry at the Counter

In the winter of 1960, Diane Nash and dozens of Fisk University students sat down at segregated lunch counters across downtown Nashville. They ordered coffee. They were refused. They sat anyway.

Week after week through February and March, trained by Methodist minister James Lawson in the discipline of nonviolence, these students returned to Woolworth's and McClellan's on Fifth Avenue. They endured cigarettes extinguished on their necks, ketchup poured over their heads, and fists driven into their backs. They did not retaliate. They did not leave.

There is a quiet irony the Gospel invites us to notice: these young men and women sat at lunch counters — places built to satisfy physical hunger — and were denied even a cup of coffee. Yet they were filled with something no waitress could serve and no mob could take away. They hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and in that hunger, they found a strength that outlasted every act of violence directed at them.

By May 10, 1960, Nashville became one of the first major Southern cities to begin desegregating its downtown lunch counters.