The New York Times, September 10, 2018: Looking our racist history in the eye
NASHVILLE — In 1960, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in this city, which was emerging as a training center for nonviolent protest. “I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration,” he said, “but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.”
When people today think of the civil rights era in the South, they think of Birmingham, Ala. They think of Little Rock, Ark. They think of Forsyth County, Ga., which warned African-Americans passing through not “to let the sun go down on your head.” They don’t think of Nashville.
But this was the first major city in the South to desegregate public facilities, lunch counters and movie theaters. It developed a calm, one-year-at-a-time approach to integrating city schools. When Ms. Nash, confronting Mayor Ben West, asked if it was wrong “to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of color,” Mr. West answered, simply, “Yes.”
These are the stories Nashville tells itself again and again: We aren’t like the rest of the South. Dr. King said so.
The problem with civic memory is that it is both true and deeply false. Some layer of reality inevitably undergirds a public fairy tale. A myth always contains enough truth to make it seem like the final word. But there’s no such thing as the final word. That’s because any history is a narrative construction, one that files off the roughest edges of the story. The past itself is shaggy, troubled, unruly. It will not be contained. William Faulkner said it best: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Here’s what’s true: Nashville did not attack its own children with fire hoses, as Birmingham did. Tennessee did not call out the National Guard to integrate its universities, as Mississippi did. There is no “Bloody Sunday” in our history, as there is in the history of Selma, Ala. But our stories about the orderly desegregation of schools and the peaceful desegregation of lunch counters and the benign treatment of black people by the white people in power? That’s all a myth.
“We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957-1968,” a set of photographs assembled by the Frist Art Museum, exposes such mythmaking for what it is. The collection features work by photographers at Nashville’s two daily newspapers, The Tennessean and the now-defunct Nashville Banner, taken during the African-American struggle for civil rights in the city. Very few of these images were published; only a handful were seen by people of the time.
One 1957 photo depicts a crowd gathered in the middle of the night outside the newly integrated Hattie Cotton School, which had been bombed shortly after midnight. A photo from 1960 shows the aftermath of a bomb set off at the home of Mr. Looby, an attorney who defended sit-in demonstrators in court. Another, from 1962, depicts the Rev. Cephus Coleman standing in front of his own house as it burns to the ground. Two 1963 photos show a girl — all of 15 — lying unconscious in the street, beaten by a police officer with a club. In another photo from 1963, an effigy of Dr. King is hung by the neck in the headquarters of the Nashville police.
The civil rights era in Nashville, in other words, was “peaceful” only in the context of the even greater brutality of our neighbors to the south.
For some time now, Nashville’s civic institutions have been issuing correctives to the persistent myth of peaceful integration here. The astonishing Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library tells the whole story of African-Americans’ struggle for full civil rights in Nashville. The nonprofit organization Historic Nashville offers a tour of civil rights landmarks in the city. Last year, The Tennessean published a series of unvarnished stories about the conflicts of that time. In 2016, when Representative Lewis returned to Nashville to accept the Nashville Public Library Literary Award for his National Book Award-winning graphic memoir, “March: Book Three,” the mayor gave him prints of his first police mug shots, taken after his arrest at the lunch counter sit-ins and long believed to be lost to history. In Nashville, we no longer want our ugliest moments to be lost to history.
The photography exhibit at the Frist closes Oct. 14, 2018, but this record of Nashville’s past will endure: Copies of the companion volume to the photography exhibit will be distributed to all branches of the Nashville Public Library and to every public school in the city, and all members of the Tennessee General Assembly will receive a copy to deliver to the public libraries in their own communities. Here’s hoping they pause to take a look first.
There’s a truth in these photographs that many of them have likely never seen before.
