Fisk University, the Nashville Sit-Ins & Civil Rights History

Nashville's civil rights history (the story of how Nashville became the training ground for the civil rights leaders who changed America): the Nashville sit-ins of February 1960 (the non-violent direct action campaign organized by students from Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and the American Baptist College — the campaign that desegregated Nashville's downtown lunch counters in May 1960, making Nashville the first major Southern city to desegregate its lunch counters): the leaders (John Lewis (1940-2020), Diane Nash (b. 1938), James Bevel (1936-2008), and Bernard Lafayette (b. 1940) — the Nashville student activists who became the most important tacticians of the national civil rights movement.