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.…