The Children

by David Halberstam

If there was one source of strength she and the other young people in this embryonic movement had, it was, more than anything else, a belief in each other.

inevitable progression to their cause, and gradually it became something of a children’s crusade as they and hundreds and thousands of black students like them throughout the country, knowing that the right moment had finally arrived, became part of a growing challenge to segregation in the South. As that assault

The most important thing she had learned from reading Gandhi during the workshops she had been attending for almost three months was that leaders did not expect others to do things they were not willing to do themselves. That was true for cleaning latrines, and it was true as well for risking their lives.

Things are happening so fast that we find ourselves in danger of leading by responding.

The talent he found around him there, Lawson soon decided, was uncommon, nothing less than the best of a generation of young black students, most of them from the South, many of them burning with an inner rage about the injustices inflicted on them, eager to find some movement to which they could belong.

This was his cause, and this was how he had always seen himself spending his time and using his considerable talents.

It’s nothing, Jimmy, it’s empty. Just ignorant words from an ignorant child who is gone from your life the moment it was said. That child is gone. You will never see him again. You do not even know his name.”

he regarded this as a numinous moment, which comes from a Latin word which means that what had happened was virtually a mystical experience, one so special that it carried with it a special sense of illumination and enlightenment. It was a moment forever frozen in time for him, and as a grown man, whenever he was moved to anger in a moment of confrontation, he would remember those words: Jimmy, what harm did that stupid insult do? Jimmy, you are loved.

Who, in this extraordinary moment when the nation’s wealth and power are so overwhelming, helps the victor to have any humility? What political form does that humility take?

Love was the most basic law of life, Muste seemed to be saying: You will love the Lord, you will work actively for Him, and thereby, because His belief is love and His life is love, you will end up seeking a concept of greater social justice and a more just (and peaceful) country and planet.

Be wary of prison food, which is starchy, and can quite quickly add lots of pounds to you and make you slothful, that is, the person they want you to be.

He believed he could endure in prison, a word he chose very carefully, for it was the word which Jesus had used for experiences like this. To endure meant that he would not only live through it, but would learn from it and grow in strength and wisdom.

Later one of the most prominent members of that early core of ministers and students who came together in Nashville, the Reverend C. T. Vivian, said that it was as if God had a master plan, bringing so many uncommon people of such rare strength and vision together in one place at one time. Jim Lawson thought that C.T. was right, that it was a coming together of rare, committed, talented people. But the word he used was different. It was providential, he said, a Methodist word which meant that God was working in people and through them to bring them together at a certain time so that certain things could happen which He had wished for.

He had to fight hard, he told them, not to give in to either of the most seductive pulls which went with his job, public rage and private depression.

Because the journey he was asking them to take was potentially so dangerous, Jim Lawson deliberately did not want to touch the powerful emotional chords within them. He was wary of the power of emotion. Instead what he wanted more than anything else was to let them find within themselves the things he had already discovered within himself.

But in stage one he had to impress on them the viability of what he was talking about; he had to convince them that this cause was real and that they could pull it off, young and uncertain though they were individually. He could also sense—indeed, virtually smell—the overwhelming doubt which so obviously existed in their minds.

Your idea is not small, he kept emphasizing—it was the first and most basic of their lessons—and because your idea is not small, your numbers will not be small either.

It would be known among their friends and peers that they had suffered and paid a price for acting on behalf of others. That would make it harder and harder for others to sit on the sidelines; therefore others would be forced to act, and in turn to take their place.

Ordinary people who acted on conscience and took terrible risks were no longer ordinary people. They were by their very actions transformed.

From the start Diane Nash liked the workshops. They were, whatever else, filled with purpose. There was nothing aimless about them.

The great thing about going to school in Nashville, he thought, was that it expanded his vision of his own people and of his country; he found there for the first time the traces of an almost secret history of black life in America, a rich, conflicted, often suppressed, often ignored history of black men and women fighting white repression over this country’s entire history.

As they spoke, their unwillingness to accept the ceiling placed on them grew. The speed of integration was pathetic. All deliberate speed was no speed at all. Every child who wanted to attend a Southern school was going to need his or her own lawsuit. The law which they had all been taught to respect was not necessarily that powerful a weapon after all, they reluctantly decided.

They were not merely rejecting the white world as it existed, they were rejecting that part of the black community which accepted the status quo.

If lesson number one had been that their numbers were not small because their idea was powerful, then lesson number two was about shedding the most powerful of all feelings—the shame of being black in a white nation which had chosen, as it suppressed its black citizens, to create a philosophy of shame and vulnerability among the very people whom it had suppressed and exploited, saying in effect that it was the victim’s fault for turning out to be the victim. It was bad enough that white people

So first, before they could accomplish anything else, he had to teach them not just pride in themselves but the capacity, when provoked, to rise above the existing cycle of anger and hatred, to be their better selves.

Nonviolent response to violence, nonviolence as a political instrument, he taught them, was the best kept secret in human history.

Jim Lawson talked instead mostly about the power of love, and among their first assignments was one in which they were supposed to discuss what love was and how it could be used as a tactic in a personal or a political crisis and why people tended instead, when confronted with a seemingly insoluble problem, to turn to their anger.

the beloved community. It was not a Utopia, but it was a place where the barriers between people gradually came down and where the citizenry made a constant effort to address even the most difficult problems of ordinary people.

They had to learn the most basic lesson of all, that it was a word which defined only those who used it, not those whom it was used against.

He had had other opportunities at respected white medical schools, but he had decided, after the Supreme Court decision on Brown, that his life as an outstanding and lonely black student in a world that was almost exclusively white had been too privileged. Was he being true to himself every day when he went out and worked so hard to meet the standards set by whites? Had his decision to succeed in the white world, he wondered, pulled him away from his essential blackness?

“The problem with the lily-white schools like the ones we know is that they take you away from the action. They’re good schools and they’re very pleasant, but the action is going to take place in the South,”

So they decided to spend December doing reconnaissance of the downtown area,

Very quietly, without letting either of the newspapers know, they sent integrated teams to a variety of stores and lunch counters. It was all very low-key and very controlled. The marching orders were quite strict:

They were to try to sense the mood and the degree of resistance in each store.

The recon taught them that if they made their assault, the resistance would be considerable. There was a wall, but it was not without its vulnerabilities.

They did not get there first.

Now finally the question arose of going beyond just a sympathy sit-in on behalf of the Greensboro students and of starting their own drive.

Kelly Miller Smith was still not sure that they were ready to go ahead. If they were to sit in, there had to be sufficient money for lawyers, and money for bail, and the truth was that the local chapter of the SCLC was broke. It had all of $87 in the kitty, Smith reported. He and some of the other ministers wanted to wait until they were a little better prepared for the problems they certainly would face when they were arrested. A lot of money, Smith warned, was going to be burned up in court costs. But the students were restless. There had been too many delays already.

Lawson, he decided, was not a fearful phony after all; rather, he was a great teacher, a man who took you beyond the easy emotional response to oppression and pushed you to find your true, better self. Yes, if you had enemies, it was easy to hate them, but what good did hating do? Who was the beneficiary of hate? And didn’t you in the end become as much a prisoner of the hatred as the man who hated you? That was what Jim Lawson was teaching them.

Nothing was going to change in the unknown, he argued—they did not know what was going to happen, what the level of resistance was going to be, and what the financial hardship would be. But, and this was the most compelling part of his argument, only by acting could they make the unknown of the white resistance become the known. As they acted, the unknown would become the known and they would be able to struggle with their problems one by one.

the most basic rule of the Movement over the next five years—if there was no risk, then all of this would have been done a long time ago. They were being asked to do it only because there was significant risk. By the time Bevel was finished speaking, the argument was effectively over.

Their posture—it was one of the first things any observer noticed—was absolutely impeccable, for on this day they all stood tall. There was, their body language seemed to say, nothing to be ashamed of in what they were doing. If individually they seemed less than heroic, being ordinary people of ordinary size and seemingly of ordinary human gifts, their dignity and their propriety were palpable.

“The niggers have just left a church downtown and are going to the department stores and demanding to be served!”

Instinctively, the decision on what to do tilted to the past rather than to the future; the store owners decided to resist.

Although Greensboro had been first, Nashville became in time the city where the student leaders were uniquely well prepared, having, unlike the Greensboro students, studied in workshops for several months.

Nashville turned out to be the ideal experience for the young student leaders. City officials in a more tolerant city might have conceded too readily and thereby deprived them of the chance to develop their leadership skills; city officials in a less tolerant, Deep South city might have crushed them immediately, not only having them arrested, but forcing the heads of all state schools to expel any student participating.

All they had was their faith, and they were bound together by that, he thought: faith in Jim Lawson as a teacher; faith in each other, that they would not let one another down at the moment of crisis; faith in what they believed was right; faith, curiously enough, in Nashville, a city they did not know and which had never been particularly generous or kind to them; faith in the country which would, they believed, somehow understand what they were doing and respond generously and support them; and finally, most of all, faith in their God, who would not allow His children to be punished for doing what was so obviously the right thing.

We live so close to each other, we see each other every day, and yet we live in a world where we might as well be deaf and dumb.

All of this created an anomaly of its own, for black councilmen like Looby and Lillard had the dubious distinction of being able to sit in and vote on whether certain people in Nashville received licenses to run restaurants where they themselves could not be served.

almost no one remembered why the paper and the mayor hated each other, but everyone on both sides remembered that they were supposed to hate the other and that neither side was permitted to give an inch.