Summary Of Nashville: The Cornerstone Of The Sit-In Movement

Nashville: The Cornerstone of the Sit-In Movement Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil and David Richmond were freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina located in Greensboro. On February 1, 1960, they walked to the F.W. Woolworth Company store, sat on stools meant exclusively for white customers and asked to be served. When they were denied, they remained seated until the store closed. The story of the “Greensboro Four” initiated a movement that would eventually accumulate to over 70,000 sit-in participants within the next year in downtowns all across America.1 While Greensboro did initiate the movement, it would not have been sustained without the help of Nashville, TN. By comparing and contrasting the

In the 1920’s, investors were concerned with attracting the white, middle-class woman shoppers and repelling African American shoppers. When property values crashed during the Great Depression, white investors used racial discrimination to defend their property values rather than including those individuals to boost sales and business. By the 1950’s suburban areas were growing with white middle-class citizens and the usually poorer, nonwhite customers from nearby residential neighborhoods permeated the downtown areas. White people began to fear that the slums were taking over the prized but depleting downtown areas. According to Isenberg in her collection of studies in Downtown America, “To many downtown investors, the prospect of serving poor, nonwhite shoppers was a “nightmare”, not a vision, of future urban commercial life”.2 Racial tensions grew and propelled the urgency of white citizens to push for urban renewal (sometimes referenced as ‘Negro Removal’) in order to help dictate who should be downtown. In opposition, blacks increasingly began to demand rights and access within the downtown

This created many problems because the new suburbs enjoyed many of the city perks without paying the taxes that funded the services. The individuals of the suburbs were not provided with the services of a fire department or sewage system so they did not want to pay the same taxes as the city dwellers. Eventually, in 1962, the Metropolitan government was created and the outer neighborhoods were annexed. As a result, the outer country neighborhoods had to pay taxes, but they were lower than that of the city dwellers until they were provided with the same equal services that the city dwellers received. This new Metropolitan Government reinforced the wealthy white populations movement to the suburbs of Berry Hill, Belle Meade, Goodlettsville, Lakewood and other growing communities outside the city.8
 Meanwhile, urban renewal was demolishing the homes and slums of inner-city residents. The slums mentioned previously housed thousands of inner-city residents and often had no running water, no heat, unsafe wiring and significantly lower life-expectancy rates. The government began to implement public housing, with the idea that removing the individuals from the slums and putting them into new, clean environments