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'Movement Schools’ and Dialogical Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

November 2012
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 34(1):155-184

DOI:10.1108/S0163-786X(2012)0000034010

Authors:

Vanderbilt University

While it is generally well-known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the U.S. southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semi-structured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially-linked movement schools—-locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and re-socializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance—we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre—products of the Nashville movement workshop schools—were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially-linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the U.S. civil rights movement in particular.

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Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change

Emerald Book Chapter: "Movement Schools" and Dialogical Diffusion of

Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights

Movement

Larry W. Isaac, Daniel B. Cornfield, Dennis C. Dickerson, James M. Lawson,

Jonathan S. Coley

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To cite this document: Larry W. Isaac, Daniel B. Cornfield, Dennis C. Dickerson, James M. Lawson, Jonathan S. Coley, ""Movement

Schools" and Dialogical Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement", Sharon

Erickson Nepstad, Lester R. Kurtz, in (ed.) Nonviolent Conflict and Civil Resistance (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and

Change, Volume 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 155 - 184

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Larry W. Isaac, Daniel B. Cornfield, Dennis C. Dickerson, James M. Lawson, Jonathan S. Coley, ""Movement Schools" and Dialogical

Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement", Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Lester R.

Kurtz, in (ed.) Nonviolent Conflict and Civil Resistance (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Volume 34), Emerald

Group Publishing Limited, pp. 155 - 184

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X(2012)0000034010

Larry W. Isaac, Daniel B. Cornfield, Dennis C. Dickerson, James M. Lawson, Jonathan S. Coley, ""Movement Schools" and Dialogical

Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement", Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Lester R.

Kurtz, in (ed.) Nonviolent Conflict and Civil Resistance (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Volume 34), Emerald

Group Publishing Limited, pp. 155 - 184

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X(2012)0000034010

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‘‘MOVEMENT SCHOOLS’’ AND

DIALOGICAL DIFFUSION OF

NONVIOLENT PRAXIS: NASHVILLE

WORKSHOPS IN THE SOUTHERN

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Larry W. Isaac, Daniel B. Cornﬁeld,

Dennis C. Dickerson, James M. Lawson Jr. and

Jonathan S. Coley

ABSTRACT

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was

widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still

We are deeply grateful to all interviewees, veterans of the southern civil rights movement, who

gave so generously of their time and knowledge of ‘‘the movement.’’ Without them, so much would

have been impossible including this project. We acknowledge ﬁnancial support from Vanderbilt

University College of Arts and Science, Vanderbilt University Interdisciplinary Discovery Grant,

the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Endowment, Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies, and the

Vanderbilt Commons. We thank the following people who played important roles in the project:

Kathy Conkwright (videography); Rosevelt Noble (videography); Cathy Kaiser (interview

transcription); Stephanie Pruitt (Vanderbilt Center for Nashville Studies); and students in several

Vanderbilt University seminars. For helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, we

thank the editors, Lester R. Kurtz and Sharon Nepstad, and three anonymous reviewers.

Nonviolent Conﬂict and Civil Resistance

Research in Social Movements, Conﬂicts and Change, Volume 34, 155–184

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0163-786X/doi:10.1108/S0163-786X(2012)0000034010

155

much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on

primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with

members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and

1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire

was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving

the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially

linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took

place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting,

creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for

dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of

the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated,

transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation

(FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple

movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville

movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop

schools – were especially important because they served as bridging

leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this

way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where

the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central

to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and

empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical

perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how

the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement

in particular.

Keywords: Civil rights movement; Nashville civil rights movement;

nonviolence; Gandhian repertoire; movement schools; diffusion

It is generally well known that the southern civil rights movement made

effective use of nonviolent civil resistance (or collective action) strategy from

the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s (McAdam, 1982;Morris, 1984). But we

know much less about how the diffusion of such a foreign praxis

– the

Gandhian nonviolent repertoire – was even possible. Two oceans, more than

two decades, and vastly different cultural and political systems separated the

famous Dandi Salt March in India from the emergence of the mass southern

civil rights movement in the United States. How did the Gandhian

nonviolent repertoire come to form the strategic heart of the southern

struggle against the Jim Crow system?

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.156

Social movement scholars have long been interested in the important role

of movement diffusion, the process by which some movement-related

innovation in oppositional culture is carried or transmitted to new or

existing members of a movement (Andrews & Biggs, 2006;Conell & Cohn,

1995;Givan, Roberts, & Soule, 2010;Myers, 2000) or from one movement

to another movement (Isaac & Christiansen, 2002). In simplest terms, a

movement in one temporal-spatial site is inﬂuenced by a movement in a

different temporal-spatial location. Conventional social science theories

and models of diffusion have generated useful insights into the question of

‘‘how movements move’’ (Isaac, 2008), but also contain limitations,

including a representation of simple information transmission based on

questionable assumptions (more below).

Important research also exists on the diffusion of the Gandhian non-

violent repertoire globally and especially into the US civil rights movement

(Chabot, 2000;Chabot 2010;Dickerson, 2005;Fox, 1997;Isserman, 1993;

Kapur, 1992;Scalmer, 2002, 2011). Some of this work contains a dialogical

approach that attempts to move beyond conventional information

transmission models in an effort to understand the difﬁcult interactive

process that diffusion of movement elements often, and especially the

repertoire in this case, entails (Chabot, 2010).

We pursue a strategy designed to unpack (not the only but) one of the

central avenues for the diffusion of nonviolent praxis from the Gandhian

independence struggles in India into the southern civil rights movement.

This ‘‘unpacking’’ is assisted by addressing three core questions about the

movement diffusion process (see Givan et al., 2010, p. 2): (1) what speci-

ﬁcally is being diffused, (2) how does the diffusion occur (i.e., what channels,

relations, carriers, or mechanisms are operating in the process), and (3) what

is the impact of the diffusion?

First, we focus on the diffusion of both the ideational (philosophy) and

the behavioral (tactical) applications of nonviolence, the Gandhian

repertoire.

Second, to get at the ‘‘how’’ of this diffusion process, we make

use of the conventional concepts of ‘‘direct’’ personal and ‘‘mediated’’

channels (Tarrow, 2005), but we also push deeper into those relationships to

illustrate more than just contact and the simple transmission of information.

Information was being carried and reworked through the structured

biographical trajectories of individuals who, in the process, were being

transformed themselves as they transformed others. These key players

acquired, learned, debated, taught, practiced, struggled, and carried the

nonviolent praxis with them from one key movement school – the Nashville

workshops – to struggles in Nashville and campaigns across the South.

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 157

To understand the diffusion process, it is important to know not only about

contacts – direct and mediated – but also about biographical trajectory

(including the migration of individuals) – before and after said ‘‘contact’’ –

and what was done in the ‘‘contact.’’

We locate the movement of key individuals as carriers of nonviolent

praxis within and between movement schools. Each ‘‘school’’ was forged by

special conditions of institutional location as well as the development of the

movement itself: Our ﬁrst major stop focuses on an institution of higher

education and black religious intellectual activity, Howard University.

From Howard University and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) we

trace a key path of diffusion to Nashville, Tennessee, and the development

of perhaps the most impressive nonviolent workshops in the entire move-

ment. This school was an organized, underground site where the deeply

intense work took place, the dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting,

and resocializing human agents who had previously been shaped by a

culture of violence.

What about the third key dimension – diffusion impact? We argue

that the diffusion path of nonviolent praxis that traveled from India

through FOR and Howard University was most effectively cultivated in

the Nashville workshops. We trace the driving role of these workshop

‘‘graduates’’ as they carried nonviolent praxis extending the movement

across the South. The committed, disciplined young activists trained in the

Nashville workshops served both as an inspirational and practical model,

actively maintaining movement momentum at critical moments in the

struggle, a major impact of the diffusion process.

Much of our empirical foundation is drawn from our study of the

Nashville civil rights movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Our

unique primary data consist of lengthy semistructured interviews of

Nashville movement participants (more below). Detailed interview data

allow us to unpack and exploit the richness of the dialogical perspective on

movement diffusion.

SOCIAL MOVEMENT DIFFUSION THEORY

AND RESEARCH

In general, diffusion directs our attention to the ‘‘socially mediated spread

of some practice within a population’’ (Strang & Meyer, 1993, p. 487). In

social movement studies, diffusion typically refers to the ﬂow or spread of

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.158

an innovation in movement culture (e.g., strategy, organizational form,

tactic, frame, symbolism, or slogan) from one geographical location to

another or from one movement to another. Key questions addressed by

movement scholars center on the social conditions that facilitate diffusion

and the mechanisms or channels through which an innovation travels

(Andrews & Biggs, 2006;Conell & Cohn, 1995;Kim & Pfaff, 2012;Myers,

2000;Oberschall, 1989;Roscigno & Danaher, 2001;Soule, 2004).

The dominant diffusion paradigm in social movement studies is some

variant of the ‘‘transmission model’’ (Chabot, 2010). An exemplar of this

approach, Tarrow’s (2005) The New Transnational Activism represents an

impressive synthesis of movement diffusion research into an integrated

model that presupposes ‘‘the large impersonal processes that lie in the

background of all forms of transnational diffusion’’ – internationalization

and communication (Tarrow, 2005, p. 103). Once an innovative event

occurs, diffusion moves along one or more of three major pathways that

connect it to new members or a different movement in a different temporal-

spatial site. In relational diffusion, based on an attribution of similarity,

information about innovative movement culture travels through direct

contact embedded in bonds of afﬁliation and personal networks. Mediated

diffusion works through an intermediary, a third party, who brokers or

bridges individuals or organizations who do not have direct contact with

each other. Finally, nonrelational diffusion is involved when there is no direct

or personal mediated contact, but instead information ﬂows through

electronic technologies like mass media or the Internet. The central focus,

irrespective of channeling mechanism, is the transmission of information. All

mechanisms lead to the same basic outcome: emulation – the adoption of the

transmitter’s ideas, symbols, or practices by new receivers; and general-

ization of action – the spread of movement frames, strategies, tactics, or

campaigns beyond its initial local setting (Chabot, 2010).

There is value in this transmission model, which has been employed in

studies such as Andrews and Biggs (2006) on the diffusion of the 1960s sit-

ins. It allows the analysis of key mechanisms across many diverse cases

(here, cities) with potential for isolating relatively important conditions. It is

useful for mapping a set of relations/channels through which a certain kind

of diffusion and conditions of its existence might operate. Of course, there

are limitations to the transmission model too. For one, it is not especially

helpful for analyzing in-depth interactive processes people experience in

acquiring knowledge of complex ideas and practices regarding social

change-directed collective action. It does not tell us how the underlying

philosophy and practice of nonviolence – so central to the sit-ins – arrived in

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 159

the American South, how actual people acquired, explored, debated, taught,

and learned from each other, carrying the nonviolent praxis across the

region designing speciﬁc tactical innovations like sit-ins. The transmission

model, with its superﬁcial information ﬂow, says nothing of the struggle, the

labor involved in acquiring proﬁciency with the nonviolent habitus, a

predisposition and way of acting to confront oppressive conditions and to

face direct assault in the process.

The emerging ‘‘dialogical perspective’’ offers a different approach to

diffusion in social movement studies, one that problematizes awareness,

understanding, agency, and implementation of new movement culture.

Earlier conceptual developments – Strang and Meyer’s (1993) ‘‘theoriza-

tion’’ of both movement innovations as well as transmitters and adopters,

and Snow and Benford’s (1999) focus on the location of agency in the

transmitter/adopter relationship – preﬁgured some features of the dialogical

model. But this perspective has been most clearly developed by studies of the

diffusion of nonviolence into the southern civil rights movement (e.g.,

Chabot, 2000, 2010;Fox, 1997;Isserman, 1993;Kapur, 1992;Scalmer,

2002, 2011).

The work of Chabot (2000, 2010) and Scalmer (2002, 2011) in particular

have signiﬁcantly advanced the dialogical diffusion model. Scalmer (2002)

conceptualizes diffusion as ‘‘sustained labor of cultural, intellectual, and

practical translation.’’ He stresses that Gandhian ideas and tactics were

transmitted, reinvented, and reinterpreted across the globe. This process was

actualized in various movements where nonviolence was adapted to parti-

cular national contexts in activities of ‘‘framing and experiment.’’ Scalmer

highlights the active role of US civil rights advocates in adopting the

Gandhian praxis even after Gandhi was dead, and how that repertoire was

transformed as it entered southern civil rights discourse.

The Gandhian repertoire was known, at least by some in the US, as early

as 1920, and penetrated intellectual and activist circles during the 1930s and

1940s, but did not begin to appear in practice until the 1940s and 1950s.

Why such a slow sequence of adaptation? A combination of conditions help

explain this lag in actual implementation and suggest the value of the

dialogical theory. First, because modern international electronic media did

not exist, most serious carrying of the Gandhian repertoire was done by

individuals who visited India with a distinct purpose of learning about the

approach. Second, there were cultural impediments to rapid adoption, even

among those who were interested and eager to do so. As Fox (1997) has

argued, both ‘‘Orientalist hyper-difference’’ (extremely exaggerated Other-

ness) and its opposite, ‘‘Western over-likeness’’ (an assimilation of identity

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.160

with Christian nonresistance, reducing it to the more familiar paciﬁsm in the

West), worked to delay the diffusion of the Gandhian praxis into the

southern civil rights movement. Finally, the implementation on the ground

was shaped, in part, by conditions stimulating mass movement actions

(e.g., political, organizational, mass consciousness – see McAdam, 1982;

Morris, 1984). However, the decade between the late 1940s and the

1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott should not be understood as a period

of Gandhian hibernation. The civil rights commitments of Gandhian

adherents were seldom singular. Prominent black Gandhian advocates –

such as Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Bayard Rustin – were equally

fervent in their support for a range of civil rights organizations. Rarely in

those early years did Gandhian adherents restrict themselves solely to non-

violent direct action strategies for black advancement, as activists tended to

divide their time and energies among multiple initiatives and methodologies

in the ﬁght for black equality of which Gandhian advocacy was only one.

Dialogical diffusion theory complicates the picture painted by the

transmission model with its monological (unidirectional), usually rapid,

superﬁcial communication ﬂow from transmitters to adopters. The dia-

logical perspective sees diffusion of movement culture (especially when it is

moving transnationally from one culture to another) as typically con-

troversial and labor intensive. ‘‘For complex tactics and repertoires to travel

across vast distances without losing their substance requires meaningful

dialogue – not just impersonal communication’’ (Chabot, 2010, p. 104).

Chabot offers a dialogical process theory that involves four basic phases of

diffusion development – awareness, translation, experimentation, and

movement application – and notes that this process ‘‘is never certain or

easy for the individuals or groups involved; it requires high levels of political

agency and endless collective struggle’’ (p. 108), especially by adopters.

Chabot’s dialogical perspective is valuable for understanding the diffusion

of the Gandhian repertoire into the US southern civil rights movement. At the

empirical level, Chabot does a ﬁne job of tracing key lines of nonviolent

relocation and development in the United States up to the 1950s. However,

the weakness in his study is that the empirical analysis (especially beyond the

1950s) does not always live up to the theory – i.e., the analysis does not really

unpack the dialogical learning process which his model, rightly in our

judgment, posits as essential to the diffusion of the nonviolent repertoire. The

intensive labor, debate, struggle involved in learning, translating, and

applying the foreign repertoire would require not only tremendous effort

but also places – movement schools – to struggle with the difﬁcult ideas before

ever applying them in confrontations with Jim Crow.

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 161

MOVEMENT SCHOOLS AND DIFFUSION THEORY

The difﬁcult processes of translating, learning, experimenting, and adopting

unusual oppositional repertoires to a new cultural context – like nonviolent

praxis from Gandhian use in India – required organized places where intense

interaction could take root, where active agents could challenge and learn

from each other. There is recognition of this concern in some social

movement diffusion theory. For example, a ‘‘critical community,’’ accord-

ing to Rochon (1998, p. 22), is where innovative ideas for social change are

generated among a ‘‘relatively small community of critical thinkers who

have developed a sensitivity to some problem, an analysis of the sources of

the problem, and prescription for what should be done about the problem,’’

while movements ‘‘bring the new ideas of critical communities to a wide

audience’’ (Rochon, 1998, p. 30). Some portions of the diffusion of non-

violent praxis into the civil rights movement do, indeed, seem to resemble

this dual division of labor described by Rochon. But the process was, in fact,

more complex and variegated.

The concrete social organization of movement schools can take a variety

of speciﬁc forms. Scholars have long pointed to the signiﬁcance of

segregated black institutional development – especially churches and centers

of higher education – in the emergence of the mass movement (e.g.,

McAdam, 1982). These venues were important because they served as hubs

of discussion and diffusion of new movement-related ideas. ‘‘Movement

churches’’ were typically headed by young, movement-oriented preachers

(often SCLC-connected) linked to ‘‘local movement centers’’ (Morris, 1984,

pp. 283–86). These churches had features of movement schools where

congregations would be engaged with gospel and movement-related issues.

Some black universities were also key centers of movement debate and

learning, including nonviolent praxis. Howard University was a prime

example (more below) of an important black educational institution that

housed intellectuals who theorized (Strang & Meyer, 1993) the Gandhian

repertoire and its agents, especially critical in the early ‘‘awareness and

translation’’ phases in foreign oppositional culture diffusion. These were

movement schools in the sense that they worked, at least in part, as centers

where movement concerns, issues, and oppositional culture became

integrated with other aspects of their main institutional mission.

Movement schooling also took place in well-known national-level social

movement organizations – like NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC. Other

movement schools took the form of ‘‘movement halfway houses,’’ like the

Highlander Folk Center in Monteagle, Tennessee, and the FOR (Morris,

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.162

1984). As Edwards and McCarthy (1992, p. 549) put it, these movement

mentoring organizations ‘‘encourage, support, and facilitate collective

action, but typically are not the organizational vehicles of that action.’’

Mentors in this arena help prepare potential activists, but then recede into

the background when movement begins to take off (p. 542).

The Nashville workshops (featured most centrally below) were yet

another but more direct and distinctive form of movement school. They

were different because they were exclusively about teaching oppositional

culture for change and training insurgents to do it; they engaged in

nonviolent direct action; they were organically embedded in not peripheral

to a local community ‘‘movement center’’ (Morris, 1984); the chief mentor

was a teacher and a participant in nonviolent direct action; and they had

regularity and duration running in Nashville from 1958 through 1961. These

dimensions of distinction were keys to the Nashville movement’s success and

to its cadre’s impact in and beyond Nashville.

DATA AND METHODS

To unpack the dialogical diffusion process, ideally one needs access to

ethnographic observational data and in-depth interviews with those who

moved through intensive learning inside movement schools. The ethno-

graphic opportunity has past, in this case, but the detailed interviews with

participants are precisely what we provide in the analysis.

Much of our empirical foundation is drawn from our long-term study of

the early Nashville civil rights movement spanning the late 1950s and early

1960s. Our unique primary data consist of lengthy (ranging from 1 to 8

hours) semistructured interviews of a demographically and socioeconomi-

cally diverse, purposive snowball sample of 38 Nashville movement core

cadre and grassroots participants conducted between 2007 and 2012. We

identiﬁed the interviewees from previous work on the Nashville movement

(Halberstam, 1998), discussions with the Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr.,

and referrals from interviewees. In the present study we feature mostly

members of the core cadre. Our detailed interview data allow us to unpack

and exploit the richness of the dialogical approach to understand the

diffusion process as these activists experienced it.

Cognizant of the limitations of retrospective interviews, we have taken

measures to minimize shortcomings that could derive from interviewees’

recall of events that transpired over four decades prior to our interviews.

First, we developed and piloted the semistructured interview schedule with

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 163

the Reverend Lawson who, as a key player in the Nashville movement,

provided insider knowledge and access to interviewees.

Second, for topics

in our interviews that were also covered in previous treatments of the

Nashville movement, we discerned that our interviewees provided reliable

information with similar content to that of prior sources. Third, in recalling

experiences they shared with other movement participants, we checked that

our interviewees provided consistent and reliable responses to our

questions. If a response seemed especially unusual, we checked it against

other sources.

HOWARD UNIVERSITY AND FELLOWSHIP OF

RECONCILIATION: SCHOOLS OF EARLY

INTELLECTUAL FERMENT

Kelly Miller Smith and James M. Lawson, Jr., key leaders in the Nashville

movement, though learning about Gandhi from different sources, traced

important links between themselves and India. Smith’s was mediated by

black intellectuals at Howard University, while Lawson’s was both mediated

by FOR and also direct. Smith, the pastor of Nashville’s First Baptist

Church – Capitol Hill, was a graduate of Howard’s School of Religion,

which housed black religious scholars who were deeply engaged in discourse

about Gandhian strategy and civil rights. A core of four professors and

deans – Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, William

Stuart Nelson – had traveled to India and met with (or studied) Gandhi on

multiple occasions, and Mays envisaged the seminary as a training ground

for an ‘‘insurgent Negro professional clergy,’’ a vision shared by the others

(Dickerson, 2005, pp. 219–223, 228;Jelks, 2002, pp. 32, 35).

In addition to teaching students, like Kelly Miller Smith, these black

scholars reached wider audiences with their written work. Their books –

e.g., Nelson’s The Christian Way in Race Relations (1947) and Thurman’s

Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) – explored connections between Christ-

ianity and Gandhian nonviolence. At the core of this provocative discourse

lay Gandhian nonviolence, which offered a philosophy and praxis that

helped colonial India defeat their British oppressors. Perhaps, this

methodology could do the same for African Americans (Dickerson, 2005,

pp. 228–232).

After Martin Luther King and others organized the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference in 1957, Smith and Andrew White, another 1940s

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.164

graduate of Howard’s School of Religion, determined that SCLC’s ﬁrst

afﬁliate should start in Nashville, leading to the Nashville Christian

Leadership Conference (NCLC) in 1958 with Smith president and White

secretary (De Gregory, 2007, pp. 57–60;Dickerson, 2009, p. 186;Smith,

1960). Although Smith was president of the Nashville NAACP, he saw a

need for the NCLC because it would ‘‘emphasize the moral and spiritual

implications of the struggle.’’ Nonetheless, he had yet to decide that

nonviolence would be the group’s preferred methodology. His meeting with

James M. Lawson, Jr., and Glenn Smiley of FOR resolved this issue

for him. Lawson and Smiley convinced Smith to allow them ‘‘to present

the idea of nonviolence [to] the group.’’ Though many NCLC members

‘‘were totally unfamiliar with anything that had to do with nonviolence,’’

the method was ultimately adopted because ‘‘it belonged in the context of

the Christian faith.’’ Smith’s exposure to Gandhian nonviolence lay within

his relationship to Nelson and in his admiration for King and the

Montgomery bus boycott. Though vaguely committed to an organization

associated with moral and spiritual values, Lawson convinced Smith to

ground these principles in Gandhian satyagraha (Smith, 1960), literally

‘‘clinging to Truth.’’

Lawson was raised in Massillon, Ohio, the son of a militant minister who

served as a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. As an

undergraduate at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio, Lawson attended a

lecture by FOR’s executive director, A. J. Muste, that stressed that paciﬁsm

originated within Christianity. Lawson became a FOR member and remem-

bered that Muste credited Gandhi with ‘‘helping the paciﬁst movement [to]

understand that paciﬁsm was not passivity or nonresistance, but was really

an active, militant theory of struggle.’’ Lawson agreed, noting that non-

violence ‘‘had its spiritual, biblical, [and] theological mores in Jesus and the

Bible.’’ Meeting Muste proved to be a pivotal moment in Lawson’s

intellectual development because it helped Lawson reﬁne his understanding

of nonviolence and how it extended beyond paciﬁsm. He juxtaposed

FOR paciﬁsm and Gandhian nonviolence and determined that Muste

mainly stood for noncooperation with evil while Gandhi promoted coura-

geous confrontation with inhumane structures and practices. As a result,

Lawson saw a need ‘‘to understand Gandhi’’ even more by ‘‘reading his

autobiography’’ and other writings about his philosophy and praxis.

Dialogue with Muste helped to transform Lawson into a Gandhian

adherent (Lawson interview, 2007).

As a result of his encounter with Muste and his deepening exploration of

Gandhi’s ideas, Lawson became a conscientious objector during the Korean

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 165

War. He remembered that ‘‘by 1949 I recognized that I could not follow

Jesus and ﬁght anybody’s war’’ (Lawson interview, 2007). After a trial,

Lawson was sent to federal prison. After his release, he worked for the

Methodist Youth Fellowship and then he was off to India. He became a

coach and chaplain at Hislop College in Nagpur, India, from 1953 to 1956,

where he also studied the Gandhian repertoire, the implications of the

Bible for nonviolence, and the world history of nonviolent struggles. His

enrollment at Oberlin Seminary brought him in contact with King, who was

invited to speak about the Montgomery campaign. Lawson, who had read

about the bus boycott while in India, explained to King why his

achievements had international signiﬁcance. King convinced Lawson to

move south to work in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Lawson

agreed and became a FOR southern ﬁeld agent.

BIOGRAPHICAL CONVERGENCE IN NASHVILLE

The political culture and institutional infrastructure of Nashville were

important for drawing key players to the city. Methodist Church head-

quarters, clergy contacts, and the relative autonomy of the black middle-

class from the white power structure were all important to Lawson’s

decision to use Nashville as his laboratory for ‘‘making many Montgom-

erys’’ (Lawson interview, 2007). The extensive black higher educational

complex was central to attracting a sizeable pool of young, bright, energetic

black students, the source of key personnel for Lawson’s workshops and the

bodies for local insurgencies.

C.T. Vivian moved from Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville’s American Baptist

Theological Seminary (ABTS), bringing experience with restaurant sit-ins

sponsored by CORE in Illinois (Vivian interview). Other key student mem-

bers of what would eventuate into Lawson’s core cadre included John Lewis

(from rural Alabama), James Bevel (from Mississippi), Bernard Lafayette

(from Tampa), all three to ABTS; Rodney Powell (from Philadelphia) and

Gloria Johnson (from Roxbury, Massachusetts) to Meharry Medical

School; Diane Nash (from Chicago), Marion Barry (from Memphis),

Angelina Butler (from South Carolina), and white exchange students

Paul LaPrad (from Indiana) and Jim Zwerg (from Wisconsin), all to Fisk

University along with others from Tennessee A&I, Peabody and Scarritt

Colleges. Moving from various parts of the country because of Nashville’s

schools, these young people were now (unwittingly) in close physical

proximity to a very different sort of school.

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.166

NASHVILLE WORKSHOPS AS AN UNDERGROUND

MOVEMENT SCHOOL

After Lawson entered Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1958, he met Kelly

Miller Smith. Two results followed their encounter. First, Smith invited

Lawson to conduct nonviolent workshops under NCLC auspices and

appointed him to the NCLC executive committee as Actions Director.

Second, Smith and Lawson tested and reﬁned, through these workshops,

critiques and reﬂections about the deployment of Gandhian nonviolence

in the Nashville movement. Lawson also continued to work for FOR, tra-

veling around the South, lecturing, doing workshops, and coordinating

action plans with grassroots activists – in short, ‘‘seeding’’ the southern

region for the sit-in wave that was to come.

Initially, the workshops started as an ‘‘adult movement.’’ Films about the

Montgomery bus boycott were shown, and nonviolence was discussed

as a strategy that might be used to redress Nashville’s racial issues. Smith

enlisted Lawson’s assistance because he ‘‘had more know how in the prac-

tical application of nonviolence than anybody we knew.’’ Lawson instituted

the workshops ‘‘on a continuing basis’’ as decisions were made in 1959 to

focus on the desegregation of lunch counters. ‘‘It seem[ed],’’ according to

Smith (1960), that lunch counters could be ‘‘an opening wedge’’ and ‘‘would

lend itself to good nonviolence technique.’’ Smith noted that Lawson ‘‘came

to me and asked what would I think about asking some students from the

campuses to the workshops.’’ This ‘‘wonderful idea’’ exceeded Smith’s

expectations because ‘‘students came and they became interested beyond

the interest of the adults who had begun it’’ (Smith, 1960). Yet, the

Nashville campaign was never only a student movement; it was always

linked to the NCLC, Kelly Miller Smith, and wider black community

(Lawson interview, 2012).

Smith and Lawson experimented with nonviolent tactics. Despite their

eventual success, Smith said these nonviolent techniques ‘‘developed out of

our situation’’ and at times ‘‘we were fumbling [and] making mistakes.’’

Smith indicated that the application of Gandhian nonviolence was imperfect

and not everyone fully comprehended its principles and objectives. When

invited by his Howard University mentor, William S. Nelson, to speak at

Howard about the Nashville movement, Smith poignantly observed that ‘‘it

[nonviolence] is developing into a way of life for some of the persons who

have participated,’’ but it has been ‘‘chieﬂy a technique, an instrument that

has proved successful in attacking certain problems.’’ Yet, few nonviolent

followers morphed into American Gandhians (Smith, 1960).

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 167

Although Smith initially discussed nonviolence as an opportune tech-

nique, Lawson used the workshops to infuse black religious culture with

Gandhian principles. He presented nonviolence as intrinsic to under-

standing the Bible, the ministry of Jesus, and as a salient theme in scriptural

interpretation. ‘‘The thing that I had done,’’ Lawson recalled, ‘‘probably

more than a good number of people who were paciﬁsts,’’ centered on

translating ‘‘the Bible into nonviolent paciﬁst terms with the critique of

violence.’’ This perspective allowed Lawson to articulate ‘‘the theory and

philosophy that undergirds nonviolence.’’ His view emphasized ‘‘the spirit

of forgiveness [and] the spirit of not wanting to do injury to others even

though they had done injury to you.’’ These ideas, Lawson argued, lay ‘‘at

the heart of nonviolent theory’’ (Lawson interview, 2007). But importantly,

the praxis being taught was not paciﬁsm, but rather militant nonviolent

direct action.

Smith and Lawson required Gandhian principles and praxis to speak to

the African American context. They brought satyagraha into the Nashville

movement and addressed it to the black activist tradition and religious

culture. Smith believed that black Nashville activists accepted Gandhian

techniques because of their preference for usable ideas and tactics to defeat

Jim Crow. Lawson recognized that African Americans, whatever the depth

of their Christian spirituality, understood and appreciated the language

and culture of the black religious heritage. Therefore, he communicated

Gandhian nonviolence through the medium of scripture and presented Jesus

and others as Biblical proponents of nonviolence and as precursors to

Gandhi. Smith and Lawson integrated Gandhian philosophy and techni-

ques into the Nashville movement. They also compelled the advocates of

competing strategies to react to its dynamic development and diffusion into

other organizations and initiatives in the broader black freedom struggle.

There were no speciﬁcally designed texts. For the pedagogical content in

workshop teachings, Lawson drew from an amalgam of sources and

methods: Biblical scriptures pertaining to Jesus and paciﬁsm; anecdotes

from John Wesley’s journals in which the Methodist founder faced down

hostile mobs; Gandhi in South Africa and India; episodes in the American

Revolution and from American labor strikes; nonviolent responses to Nazi

occupation in Denmark; and details of the Montgomery bus boycott.

Lawson and Vivian also drew on previous experiences with CORE. Mock

lunch counter scenes were used in a role-playing approach to teach and

select those who would be best able to execute the nonviolent tactics in

practice (Lawson interview, 2012; also documentary ﬁlms by Hampton,

1987;York, 2000). Lawson emphasized a four-step process in Gandhian

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.168

protest, including (1) focus – what issue/problem would be identiﬁed;

assessment of the issue, planning, and selection of a target; (2) planning the

campaign; (3) launching the campaign and negotiations; and (4) follow-up,

including the development of agreements for change (Lawson interview, 2012).

One of the truly remarkable features of the Nashville movement was

the organizational infrastructure built by Smith, Lawson, and others (see

Fig. 1). Not only was Lawson one of the architects but he was the lynchpin –

present in each node of the organizational network – that linked student

leaders from local colleges (via the Student Central Committee) to the

movement church (via Smith’s Church) and the broader Black community

(via NCLC), both sides feeding into Lawson’s workshops which served as

‘‘command central’’ for recruiting, training, planning, organizing, and

eventually launching the insurgent actions of the Nashville movement. This

set of organizational linkages constituted a local movement center (Morris,

1984, p. 40), with workshops embedded in and fueled by the local student

and community organizations. The NCLC provided community support,

revenue, legal, and medical assistance; the Student Central Committee

mobilized the young bodies that would be put on the line; and Lawson’s

workshops were literally local movement schools.

Black

Educational

Institutions: Fisk,

Tenn. A&I

ABTS, Meharry

Student Central

Committee:

Leaders from all

Schools (Lawson)

“Movement

Church:”

First Baptist Rev.

Kelly Miller

Smith

Lawson’s

Workshops

Nashville

Nonviolent

Movement

NCLC: Smith

& Lawson

Fig. 1. Nashville Movement’s Local Organizational Infrastructure.

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 169

It is important to understand the ways in which the workshops functioned

as schools. First they were, in a Deweyian (Dewey (1944/1916, pp. 18–19)

sense, deliberately constructed and regulated environments within which the

‘‘mental and moral disposition of their members’’ could be shaped and

inﬂuenced. The deliberately constructed environments, the physical places,

were important. The oppositional culture and philosophical and practical

conversations that were to lead to insurgent actions were largely hidden

in relatively safe spaces of basements and backrooms of various black

churches, especially Clark Memorial United Methodist (near Fisk Univer-

sity) and Smith’s First Baptist.

Second, there was a curriculum of sorts, an intentionally designed but

ﬂuid lesson plan that consisted of an oppositional culture centered on the

praxis of nonviolent direct action. It was that praxis which would be

animated through the students in the form of confrontations with speciﬁc

laws and norms of the local Jim Crow system. The workshops were the little

incubator, the laboratory to experiment with and cultivate the beginning of

‘‘many Montgomerys,’’ Lawson’s hope for expanding and accelerating the

pace of the movement into a nonviolent revolution.

Lawson faced major challenges before he and his students were to

confront local Jim Crow. The students who came to his workshops already

carried hot emotions – anger and resentment – and Lawson was careful not

to fuel these feelings (Hogan, 2007). He moved carefully, slowly, and

deliberately to channel youthful energy and emotion into a resocialization

process that would transform them into disciplined nonviolent warriors. But

before they could be schooled in the praxis of nonviolent direct action,

Lawson had to ﬁrst persuade these mostly skeptical young people – who

clearly understood the power asymmetry between themselves and the system

they hoped to change – of several difﬁcult truths. First, he had to convince

them that they were somebody. Years of internalized racism – feelings of

self-doubt, inferiority, shame, and anger – had to be converted into an

engine of pride, strength, and determination. Second, he had to show them

that because their idea for change was big and just (also Halberstam, 1998,

p. 61), so too would the numbers who would follow them be large and carry

tremendous force. Finally, Lawson had to convince them that nonviolence

provided the answer, the key, to the age-old riddle – how do the relatively

powerless confront power without succumbing to its violent tactics (thus

perpetuating a vicious cycle) and without committing self-annihilation in the

process? Embedded in and products of a dominant violent American

culture, this would be no small task. Many

students fully admitted that they

were initially very skeptical of this philosophy, especially the idea of

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.170

absorbing a violent attack without an in-kind counter-response. Yet, they

continued to attend the movement school. They wanted to ﬁght for change

and were truly attracted to their mentor. For instance, John Lewis (inter-

view) said of Lawson:

He was very smart, brilliant. He persuaded us. He came across as the embodiment, as the

personiﬁcation of the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. He was not just

preaching a sermon. In a sense he was living it. ythe concept of the beloved

community ymaking Nashville an open city yan all-inclusive community yit was

very appealing to me yThat ordinary people, students, could change the world.

Others commented on Lawson’s teaching abilities in similar ways: ‘‘a

remarkable teacher-facilitator-leader’’ (Murphy interview); ‘‘he was very bril-

liant ycareful, caring, sophisticated yvery intense’’ (Lafayette interview).

The young participants described the workshops as typically consisting of

two segments: one in which Lawson would teach world history and

philosophy of nonviolence drawn from the Bible, Thoreau, Niebuhr,

Gandhi, and others; the other portion would be focused on the practical,

dealing with role-playing, staging little ‘‘sociodramas’’ within which the

students would try-on the positions of demonstrator and antagonist; and

there were lessons on how to best protect their bodies during attacks (Lewis

interview). James Floyd (interview) described a ‘‘sociodrama.’’

Like I said, we role played. They would choose one of us from the group yand say

come up here, let me show you, here’s how we do it. One of the facilitators would say,

[N word]! And they’d push you, and they gave us an example of how to act.

James Murph (interview) described a workshop on marching protocol:

[the workshop leaders would] say now what we want you to do is when we leave the

church we want you in ﬁles of two, you’re not to be looking to the left or the right, just

look straight ahead. And even if the person beside you get hit, just don’t react, just keep

moving. Just keep moving, don’t talk back, don’t do any words that would cause any

kind of disturbances, just keep moving.

The curriculum of sociodramas expanded as the protestors returned from

live demonstrations to debrief at workshops. Angelina Butler (interview)

explained how the debrieﬁngs shaped a cumulative workshop curriculum of

increasingly violent sociodramas in the face of mounting live violence from

antagonists in downtown Nashville during early ‘‘test sits’’ in late 1959:

Students in Nashville were testing downtown area restaurants in small groups, going

back to the workshops, reporting what happened to them on the journey, reporting how

they felt about the interaction where the people had threw something at them on a

counter or put a cigarette butt out on their back, or whether a person spat on them for

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 171

sitting at the counter. But [initially] the idea was not to get arrested, it was to go back to

the workshops when threatened with arrest and now let’s talk about what happened,

because that’s part of the training for preparedness of having a nonviolent

demonstration and movement. So we’d not only go back and talk about it, we would

then place ourselves in a position of pretending to be on the demonstration where now

people would do even worse things to you than had happened to you on the day that you

went downtown to practice yNow the problem is how do you feel, what’s your

reaction, this is how it’s going on.

At a personal level, the workshop experiences, even before the crucible of

actual confrontation with real antagonists, were profoundly transformative.

There is substantial evidence from social movement scholarship that direct

involvement in movement collective action (protests, confrontations, etc.)

can have both short- and long-term transformative inﬂuence on partici-

pants’ lives (e.g., Fendrich, 1993;McAdam, 1988). But seldom have scholars

found that schooling in preparation of actual insurgent involvement can be

as transformative as it was for Lawson’s workshop prote

´ge

´s. Curtis Murphy

(interview) knew that he was going through a major change when it was

happening. He moved from deep skepticism about nonviolence to then

accepting it as at least a strategy for social change and became a major

movement recruiter on the Tennessee A&I campus. Murphy described the

change in his attitude about nonviolence:

But the ﬁrst meeting as I recall, I think there were 7 or 8 of us students there and Jim

[Lawson] started talking about this Mahatma Gandhi and this philosophy of

nonviolence. And I’m thinking that’s whacked, somebody hits me, I’m creaming them.

Nonviolence? No. That’s not even logical. I’m sitting there listening but I’m thinking this

doesn’t make sense. But obviously it’s something he said that stuck with me, and after

the next enough to get me to come back to the next meeting. Then the more I thought

about it, I said let me do a little research, that’s when I started to see there’s some merit

there. y. But my initial reaction was nonviolence? What are you, scared? You coward!

Only a coward would allow people to attack them and they don’t defend themselves. But

then the more I went to the meetings the more I began to learn from Jim and my

readings, I realize that it took a much braver person to practice nonviolence than one to

strike back.

The workshops also imparted the practical message of the futility of

violent resistance. The movement could never match the violence of their

antagonists, and the workshops stressed the importance of not ﬁghting back

if only to protect fellow protestors from a violent reaction by antagonists.

This message partly informed Murphy’s (interview) acceptance of non-

violence as a ‘‘tool’’:

I began to see [nonviolence] as a very practical tool yI oftentimes would say to the

other participants, I am not a paciﬁst. I am not nonviolent. But when I am with you I am

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.172

those things, because yI knew that I would never do anything that would hurt the

group.

Learning to exercise self-restraint in the face of piercing insults was

especially challenging for workshop participants. Bernard Lafayette (inter-

view), for example, could endure physical pain more than emotional pain:

I got to these workshops in Nashville, the whole business of turning the other cheek and

that kind of thing, I thought about it, but it wasn’t my style, turning the other cheek. But

that wasn’t the issue for me. The more important issue for me was how would I feel after

someone had maybe slapped me or spat on me. My biggest struggle was internal. The

outside physical pain, I had endurance for that, and a great deal of tolerance for pain.

Joe Goldthreate (interview) explained that the workshops had helped him

to control his inclination to respond violently to deep insults and instilled in

him the message that the security of the group depended on his exercise of

self-restraint. The workshops prepared him for his eventual violent removal

from a lunch counter:

We went to the meetings and we started to learn how to be nonviolent, people knocking

you around yI could handle everything but spitting, the white guy walked by and spit

in my face, if you want to be a part of the program at that time, you couldn’t ﬁght back.

You put everybody in jeopardy of getting hurt or killed. So I had to accept it if I wanted

to be a part yDon’t give them a reason to turn to violence. That was the number one

thing that was preaching. I guess when they knocked me out of the chair and spit on me

and drug me, I was prepared for that because I’d been trained day in and day out.

Diane Nash, also initially very skeptical, was transformed: ‘‘I found

beautiful things in people who would care enough about other people to

put their bodies between another person and danger’’ (Powledge, 1991,

p. 208). Jim Zwerg (interview) spoke of acquiring strength from others in

the group that changed him deeply, ‘‘an incredible, spiritual bond ywhat

Lawson used to call a soul force.’’ John Lewis recounts that once he

began attending those workshops ‘‘in the basement of Clark [Memorial

United Methodist Church] [they] became the focus of my life’’ (Lewis,

1998, p. 76). He described the experience as ‘‘the most exciting, and most

moving time as a student, as a young person’’ and attributes his loss of

shyness and leadership growth to the workshops and the sit-ins resulting

from them. It was here that ‘‘ yI discovered something about myself

that I didn’t know I had’’ (Lewis interview). Bernard Lafayette, too, found

the workshops to be a ‘‘life-changing experience’’ (Lafayette interview).

Novella Page (interview) spoke of gaining strength from her peers,

noting especially the courage and calm she observed in another young

woman, Diane Nash. She pointed to the group’s solidarity as a deep

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 173

source of excitement. Lawson’s movement workshops took angry,

skeptical, shy, self-doubting young people and thoroughly resocialized

them into effective leaders and an effective ﬁghting force. The workshops

worked, in the words of Lafayette (2008), to fundamentally ‘‘educate our

emotions.’’

But did this personal transformation matter for the movement? The

participants felt strongly that it did. The leadership produced by the

workshops and their impact was crucial to the movement’s strength. Marion

Barry (interview) concluded that it was the leadership that made the

Nashville movement so unique. Jim Zwerg (interview) credits Lawson as the

key reason for the Nashville movement’s development and success. C.T.

Vivian (interview) also attributes the special place of the Nashville

movement – ‘‘producing more leaders than the rest of the movement

combined’’ – to the Lawson workshops. As John Lewis (interview) put it:

‘‘It is fair to say that more student leaders and more nonstudent leaders

emerged out of the Nashville movement than any other [local] movement.’’

They came through Nashville for a ‘‘period of training’’ [in movement

school] before they matriculated bringing the ﬁght to Nashville, then across

the South.

As complex dialogically intense processes, the Lawson workshops were

many things. They were a place to confront self-doubt and fears; where

world history, philosophy, and practical tactics of nonviolent direct action

could be taught and practiced; where raw emotion would be channeled

and shaped; to cultivate many grassroots leaders; to create solidarity

among bright, determined cadre of young activists; to begin imagining and

working towards the utopic ‘‘beloved community’’; to build a clear

intentional design for assault on Nashville’s Jim Crow system, the beginning

of Lawson’s hope and inspiration for ‘‘making many Montgomerys.’’ At

root, the workshops were truly schools for the performing arts of nonviolent

protest and James Lawson was the headmaster, one who insisted not only

on nonviolence, but also the importance of organization, participatory

democracy in deliberation, and discipline.

The Nashville movement quickly emerged as the model local movement,

an exemplar of what could be done and how to do it. By May 1960 the

local movement had successfully desegregated the lunch counters of six

downtown stores. Dr. King had proclaimed the Nashville movement his

inspiration and shining example for the larger movement – ‘‘the best

organized and the most disciplined in the Southland’’ (quoted in Lewis,

1998, p. 111). By the end of 1962, many downtown commercial establish-

ments and public accommodations had been desegregated – a major blow to

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.174

the local Jim Crow system and another crack in the ediﬁce of white

supremacy throughout the South, two years before the landmark Civil

Rights Act of 1964. Lawson was being featured in movement literature for

his militant, forward-looking model of ‘‘nonviolent revolution’’ launched

by a growing ‘‘nonviolent army’’ (Lawson, 1961, pp. 2–3).

MOVING THE MOVEMENT BEYOND NASHVILLE

The impact of the Nashville cadre extended far beyond the city limits. The

movement that took organizational form in 1958 and then went into the

implementation of movement phase in February 1960 did not stop with

local accomplishments. The diffusion of Gandhian nonviolence from India

to Nashville spread to civil rights activities elsewhere in the American

South. Smith, Lawson, and other activists, by reinventing satyagraha in a

new cultural context, provided both physical and intellectual energy to

several derivative movements that emerged out of the Nashville campaign.

Just as they viewed the Montgomery bus boycott and King as inspira-

tional paradigms for the Nashville movement, these lessons were absorbed

and a new synthesis emerged in Nashville for others to adapt. The

Nashville campaign, by sharing its personnel and principles in other

southern settings, helped energize a dynamic diffusion. Trained by

Lawson, learning the Gandhian repertoire and earning their ‘‘movement

credentials’’ in Nashville, much of the core cadre went on to carry

knowledge and action of nonviolent oppositional culture across the South,

a key path of diffusion.

The ﬁrst major step was the founding of the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960 at Shaw University in

Raleigh, N.C. Most colleges sent one or two representatives. Sixteen came

from Nashville, including James Lawson, Diane Nash, John Lewis, James

Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry (Carson, 1981;Hogan, 2007).

Following Ella Baker’s sage advice, the young warriors formed their own

autonomous organization, related to but distinct from the church elders and

leadership of the SCLC. ‘‘The ﬁery Lawson, the young peoples’ Martin

Luther King, as some called him, received a standing ovation from the

students’’ when he addressed the group (Payne, 2007, p. 96). The SNCC

founding statement, drafted largely by Lawson, ‘‘afﬁrmed the philosophy or

religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the

presupposition of our faith, and manner of action.’’ The Nashville group

played a key role in shaping the founding session. Others present noted the

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 175

distinctiveness of the Nashville cadre – the disciplined commitment to

‘‘militant nonviolence’’ and emphasis on participatory democracy – marks

of the Nashville workshops, movement culture brought into the SNCC

(Hogan, 2007;Polletta, 2002). The Nashville group’s inﬂuence steered the

course of the SNCC for the ﬁrst half of the Sixties. First national chairman

(1960–61), Marion Barry, and third chairman (1963–66), John Lewis, were

both core members of the Nashville cadre trained by Lawson. Situated

between these two, Charles McDew (1961–63) was quickly drawn to the

Nashville group as if he were a member of it. From inception to 1966, the

daring youth organization would be clearly stamped by the Nashville cadre

(cf., Hogan, 2007, pp. 34–38).

During the Nashville era of SNCC, the

organization also inspired the formation of and helped teach movement

culture to northern movements – the Students for Democratic Society (SDS)

and the Northern Student Movement (NSM) – and inspired the formation

of the largely white Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC)

founded in Nashville in 1964 (Hogan, 2007). Without the Nashville cadre, it

is uncertain whether there would have ever been a SNCC, the organization

that played a dynamic role as daring shock troops throughout the southern

struggle (Carson, 1981;Hogan, 2007;Payne, 2007).

The next major step in moving beyond Nashville came the following

spring. In May 1961, the ﬁrst CORE-launched freedom ride, to test

southern compliance with recent federal law desegregating interstate bus

travel, met with white violence outside Anniston where one bus was ﬁre-

bombed, and the other was attacked by a white mob in Montgomery.

Concerned about continuing violence and the safety of the riders, the

CORE leadership halted the rides. Because there had not been a signiﬁcant

tactical innovation since the sit-in wave the previous year, the wider

movement could have easily come to a halt itself with the violence-induced

cancellation of the rides, a conclusion quickly drawn by the Nashville

group. As Diane Nash, who would assume the role of coordinator of the

Nashville-led freedom rides, put it: ‘‘The students [Nashville group] have

decided that we can’t let violence overcome. yIf they stop us with

violence, the movement is dead.’’

In short, the Nashville cadre picked up where CORE left off. They

traveled to Alabama and then continued the freedom ride, facing signi-

ﬁcant danger throughout (see Arsenault, 2006). SNCC Mississippi

campaign veteran, Bob Moses, thought that ‘‘only the Nashville student

movement had the ﬁre to match that of the burning bus’’ (quoted in

Hogan, 2007, p. 45). Historian Wesley Hogan’s (2007, p. 45) assessment is

on mark: ‘‘The difference between what had been accomplished in the

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.176

Nashville sit-ins and the impromptu sit-ins that occurred across the South

now became vividly evident in the students’ response to white violence in

Alabama.’’ The organization, training, schooled discipline and commit-

ment – products of Lawson’s workshops – were, once again, contributing

powerfully to the continued ﬂow of the overall movement. Conventional

approaches to modeling movement diffusion would miss this critical

heterogeneity, differences in the diffusion of the sit-in wave (Andrews &

Biggs, 2006), the freedom rides, and other forms of movement-related

collective action.

Undeterred by the brutal mob violence they faced in Montgomery, which

was now under martial law, the Nashville Freedom Riders resolved to

complete their mission by boarding a bus to Jackson, Mississippi, on May

24, 1961. The Alabama National Guard accompanied them in the bus to

the state line, leaving the Freedom Riders to enter Mississippi without

police or military protection on the bus. They arrived in Jackson without

incident, were instantly arrested as they desegregated the Jackson bus

station, jailed in the Hinds County prison in Jackson, refused bail and

refused to pay a $200 ﬁne, and then transferred to the Hinds County prison

farm where they suffered horrid prison conditions for about two weeks. In

the middle of the night of June 15, they were abruptly transferred in a

windowless truck trailer to the gulag-like Parchman maximum-security state

penitentiary in a remote delta location some 100 miles northwest of Jackson,

where they served 60-day hard sentences (Lewis, 1998, pp. 154–172).

In Parchman, the Nashville Freedom Riders, who were now joined

by Freedom Riders from throughout the South and the nation, endured

racism of all sorts and the severe repressive measures of intimidation,

conﬁnement, harsh physical conditions, water hosings, humiliation, and

mail censorship. Incarcerated two to a cell and segregated by race and

gender, the insurgents developed a repertoire of nonviolent resistance with

acts that reﬂected the constraints and possibilities afforded them by the

physical and social organization of their conﬁnement (Lewis, 1998, pp. 168–

172). Nonviolent resistance entailed reading and reinterpreting prison-

provided bibles, communicating with Nashville activists in secret written

code, and singing spiritual and movement songs. The Nashville cadre

worked to convert the oppressive prison conditions to an ongoing

makeshift workshop on nonviolent struggle for less experienced among

them (Arsenault, 2006, p. 349;Nelson, 2011 documentary). When released

from Parchman, some stayed in Mississippi to do organizing, training,

and voter registration. Bernard Lafayette and James Bevel stayed in

Jackson, joined by Diane Nash, Catherine Burks, and Paul Brooks, while

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 177

Marion Barry, Lester McKinnie, Charles Jones, and John Hardy worked

in the McComb and other regions of Mississippi (Hogan, 2007;Payne,

2007).

Through the remainder of the movement heyday and beyond, the

Nashville cadre were present in every ﬂashpoint and city campaign driving

the movement forward. This roll call includes the Albany campaign of 1961–

62 – Charles Jones, Cordell Reagon, James Bevel, and Diane Nash

(Halberstam, 1998;Hogan, 2007, p. 67); the ‘‘Rock Hill Four’’ jailings –

Diane Nash, Charles Jones (Hogan, 2007, pp. 51–52); the Birmingham

campaign (1963) – James Lawson and Diane Nash led nonviolent

workshops, and James Bevel was responsible for mobilizing the nonviolent

direct action through his ‘‘children’s campaign’’ that directly confronted

Bull Connor’s dogs, clubs, and ﬁre hoses (Hogan, 2007, p. 242); the March

on Washington (1963) – John Lewis gave a speech as SNCC chair; Freedom

Summer campaign 1964 – James Lawson ran nonviolent workshops at the

boot-camp for the white volunteers in Oxford, Ohio, before they embarked

for Mississippi (Hogan, 2007, p. 162); the Selma campaign (1965) – John

Lewis, C.T. Vivian, James Bevel, and Bernard Lafayette, among others,

were engaged; and Memphis sanitation workers’ strike (1968) dovetailed

with Martin Luther King’s ‘‘Poor Peoples’ Campaign’’ – James Lawson,

now a Memphis pastor, was integral in bringing Dr. King to the city to

support the strikers. By the mid-1960s, members of the Nashville cadre were

also serving on the Executive Board of SCLC, including James Lawson,

C.T. Vivian, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette.

Any one of these involvements would rank as signiﬁcant movement

activity. But the overall record of the Nashville cadre stands out among all

the courageous actions by so many throughout the civil rights movement.

The ‘‘Greensboro Four’’ launched the famed sit-in on February 1, 1960, that

ignited a mass wave of student sit-ins across the South that spring. But

the movement engagement of those four was short lived in contrast to

the extended record of Nashville cadre. In historian Clayborne Carson’s

(1981, p. 16) words, ‘‘It was these Nashville activists, rather than the four

Greensboro students, who had an enduring impact on the subsequent

development of the southern movement.’’ Movement schools – the work-

shops – were the key for the Nashville cadre whose commitment kept them

traveling, carrying, using, and spreading the nonviolent praxis as they

challenged Jim Crow across the South. This was simultaneously the content,

the vehicle, and the impact of their diffusion process, one that was deeply

dialogical.

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.178

CONCLUSION

Our most general goal has been to further illuminate one of the central

pathways through which nonviolent praxis diffused from India into the

southern civil rights movement. Building on social movement diffusion

scholarship in general and the diffusion of the Gandhian repertoire in

particular, our contribution centers the conceptual signiﬁcance of biogra-

phical trajectories (including individual migration and movement of carriers

of oppositional culture through space), the role of movement schools, and

unique data consistent with demands of the dialogical model. These

theoretical and empirical strengths have allowed us to offer important

insights into the southern civil rights movement. We conclude by

elaborating the signiﬁcance of these claims.

We begin with the theoretical contribution. We have contributed to the

dialogical model of diffusion. That perspective emphasizes the often

difﬁcult interactive labor involved in the process of diffusing a complex

movement culture, like the Gandhian repertoire. In all phases – acquisition,

translation, experimentation, and application – people must invest time,

energy, emotion, and other resources in learning to understanding,

creatively modifying, teaching, and employing a foreign movement

repertoire in a different political-cultural setting. This often means painful

unlearning of prior knowledge, as was the case in the Nashville workshops,

a process that not all participants could successfully accomplish. We have

also shown that biographical trajectories are crucial for understanding the

carrier, teacher, and activist roles essential to the diffusion process of a

foreign movement culture. Movement of individual biographies and their

convergence in space is essential to fully developing the dialogical theory of

diffusion. Carriers of a novel movement culture cannot do much

individually with their new insights if they lack an appropriate platform

that allows for convergence with potentially interested others – social

spaces or environments that give the dialogical process a chance to unfold.

Our concept of movement schools ﬁlls this important gap in the dialogical

model. The School of Religion at Howard University and Lawson’s

workshops both operated as movement schools, but in quite different ways.

The intellectual ferment at Howard was central to the early learning –

awareness and translation – of the Gandhian repertoire. The Lawson

workshops had to focus on initial learning as well as implementation of

direct action praxis – an Americanized Gandhian repertoire – designed to

tear down Jim Crow and to move closer to the beloved community.

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 179

Movement schools can take a variety of speciﬁc forms, but they are

frequently locations where the most intense emotional dialogue and creative

labor take place. We believe the concept is an essential addition to the

dialogical perspective on movement diffusion.

Second, our study makes a methodological-empirical contribution to the

dialogical perspective. Because the dialogical approach emphasizes the role

of in-depth face-to-face interaction during the travails of translation,

experimentation, and application of novel movement culture, it makes

strong data demands. Ethnographic data, detailed documents recording

such schooling sessions (e.g., ﬁlm), and/or in-depth interviews with those

having experience in such movement schools are necessary if we are to get

the most from and continue to develop the dialogical diffusion perspective.

Our detailed interviews with many of the Nashville cadre ﬁt this requirement

well.

Finally, our analysis contributes to knowledge of the southern civil rights

movement – how nonviolent oppositional culture diffused through two

main paths and the role of movement schools in the process.

We have

illuminated the formation of the Nashville movement center (building on

Morris, 1984) but have gone beyond previous research by highlighting the

inner workings of an important movement school, the Lawson workshops.

We have shown how the Gandhian repertoire diffused to Nashville through

key players and how it was dialogically labored over in the workshops,

how students in those workshops gravitated to Lawson, struggled with the

ideas he presented, put those ideas into action, and in the process trans-

formed the ideas as well as themselves, and helped transform American

society.

The Nashville movement school was distinctive because of the (a)

powerful and committed mentorship of James Lawson, (b) organic form-

ation and employment of participatory democratic culture, (c) local

embeddedness in and support from Nashville’s black student and com-

munity leaderships, and (d) regularity and duration of the workshops. The

workshops were centerpiece schools of the southern movement – the most

well-organized, most continuously functioning, and the most well-taught.

Consequently, they produced a highly successful local movement – an

exemplar for the wider southern struggle – and the largest number of highly

disciplined and committed nonviolent leader-activists and teachers of any

local movement in the struggle. They carried (diffused) the ﬁght using an

Americanized Gandhian repertoire throughout the South. The success of the

southern civil rights movement was due, in no small part, to the movement

school in Nashville.

LARRY W. ISAAC ET AL.180

NOTES

1. By ‘‘praxis’’ we mean a philosophy (of engagement or action) and the action

itself.

2. We use the term ‘‘Gandhian repertoire’’ to signify the essential elements (not

the entire culturally speciﬁc features of Gandhi’s praxis) that were eventually

adapted by the US southern civil rights movement. These include an alternative

conceptualization of ‘‘power’’ based on three principles: (1) respect for one’s

opponents as persons, (2) refusal to cooperate with unjust power, and (3) the struggle

to create alternative systems of power through nonviolent direct action (see Kurtz,

2008, p. 840; 2012). ‘‘Nonviolent direct action’’ is social action directed at chang-

ing evil/oppressive/unjust social arrangements by directly confronting/resisting/

challenging and not cooperating with such arrangements through nonviolent means,

which includes suffering violence at the hands of the opposition but never retaliating

with violence (see Sharp, 2010, Appendix One, for a lengthy inventory of speciﬁc

forms of nonviolent direct action). This action is rooted in the tradition of civil

disobedience that deliberately violates unjust social arrangements for purposes of

expressing a moral and political message. The creativity of the Gandhian repertoire

is that it offers a new paradigm for social change predicated on the synthesis of two

traditional, yet orthogonal, perspectives – violent warfare and paciﬁsm. The

Gandhian nonviolent activist ‘‘ﬁghts like the warrior but avoids harming like the

paciﬁst’’ (Kurtz, 2008, p. 840; 2012).

3. James M. Lawson, Jr. was a participant-observer in the Nashville movement

and the broader southern civil rights movement. He was also a key informant and

interviewee in our project as well as a co-author of this chapter. While he provided

crucial information, our characterization of the importance of his participa-

tion comes from testimony of other participants who we interviewed, not his own

self-assessment.

4. For example, Marion Barry (interview), Bernard Lafayette (interview), Charles

Murphy (interview), Diane Nash (Powledge, 1991, p. 208), and Jim Zwerg

(interview) all admitted to this initial difﬁculty.

5. In 1961, SNCC formed a ﬁve-person executive committee, three of whom were

drawn from the Nashville cadre – James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Charles Jones – in

addition to McDew and Moses (Hogan, 2007, p. 65).

6. Nash quoted in Arsenault (2006, p. 184). Not only did the Nashville cadre

contribute signiﬁcantly to maintaining overall movement momentum (Arsenault,

2006;Hogan, 2007), but those connected to the Nashville movement supplied more

freedom riders than any other city and launched more intercity freedom rides

(Arsenault, 2006, Appendix).

7. Diffusion was assisted by mass media coverage of protest events, like the sit-ins,

once they began to unfold in February 1960 (Andrews & Biggs, 2006). However,

prior diffusion processes set the stage for the rapid take-off of the sit-ins: During the

second half of the 1950s, the South had been ‘‘seeded’’ for the adoption of the sit-ins

once they emerged in other locations, like Greensboro. That seeding came from

several sources: (1) The diffusion of information about local successes in places like

Montgomery (1955–56) and Tallahassee (1956) had been spreading by word of

mouth; (2) movement culture was spreading through literature; FOR wrote,

Nashville Workshops and Diffusion of Nonviolence 181

published, and distributed a comic-book style pamphlet – ‘‘Martin Luther King and

the Montgomery Story’’ – that was considered a subversive and exciting source of

information, especially among young black students (see Isaac, 2008;Lewis, 1998,

pp. 74–5) and Dr. King wrote Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1957)

documenting the key lessons of that campaign; and (3) there were traveling

movement evangelists, like FOR ﬁeld representatives Glenn Smiley and James M.

Lawson, Jr., who performed nonviolent workshops across the South during the late

1950s.

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Jan 2010

Lester R. Kurtz

Whereas conventional wisdom assumes that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, or is given to those who steer a course down the mainstream, Gandhi's success lies in not accepting dominant paradigms but in challenging them. Gandhi synthesizes the two contradictory teachings in the world's religious and ethical traditions about violence in the nonviolent activist who fights like a warrior but - like the pacifist - avoids harming others. This article reviews the history and basic tenets of Gandhian nonviolence and examines its impact in various spheres from the Indian Freedom Movement to anticolonial, civil rights, and human rights movements. Finally, we briefly examine the implications of Gandhian thought for social theory.

The Labor of Diffusion: The Peace Pledge Union and The Adaptation of The Gandhian Repertoire

Article

Oct 2002

Sean Scalmer

The history of the Peace Pledge Union of Britain illuminates the process of social movement repertoire diffusion. In the late 1950s and 1960s British pacifists successfully used nonviolent direct action, but this was based upon a long-term engagement with Gandhism. Systematic coding of movement literature suggests that the translation of Gandhian methods involved more than twenty years of intellectual study and debate. Rival versions of Gandhian repertoire were constructed and defended. These were embedded in practical, sometimes competing projects within the pacifist movement, and were the subject of intense argument and conflict, the relevance of Gandhism was established through complex framing processes, multiple discourses, and increasing practical experimentation. This article offers methodological and conceptual tools for the study of diffusion. A wider argument for the importance of the reception as will as performance of contention is offered.

Culture Moves: Ideas, Activism, and Changing Values

Book

Dec 1998

Thomas R. Rochon

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.

Article

Feb 2000
J South Hist

Civil Rights Movement

Chapter

Dec 2015

Aldon Morris

Fifty years ago African Americans were severely oppressed. Not only were they unable to enjoy many of the basic citizenship rights guaranteed by the US Constitution but also, under Jim Crow, blacks were denied the franchise, barred from interacting with whites in public spaces, and trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder, where they were relegated to the poorest paying and least desirable jobs. The modern civil rights movement, a major social force in the mid-1950s, was the vehicle through which African Americans and their supporters overthrew Jim Crow. Partly as a response to this groundbreaking movement, scholars have constructed a new concept of social movements where organization, strategic thinking, cultural traditions, and political encounters figure largely as explanatory factors in analyses of social movements.

If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left

Article

Jan 1989
Lab Travail

Alternative Types of Cross-national Diffusion in the Social Movement Arena

Chapter

Jan 1999

McAdam and Rucht (1993) have recently bemoaned the neglect of diffusion processes in the study of social movements. Clearly there has been work that bears on aspects of diffusion among social movements (Oberschall 1995). But McAdam and Rucht are correct in noting that research and theorization aimed at ferreting out the links among social movements and ‘the dynamics by which they are forged’ (1993: 73) pales in comparison to interest in the emergence of discrete social movements and the factors accounting for constituent participation.

Diffusion Processes within and across Movements

Article

Dec 2007

Sarah A. Soule

The Diffusion of Social Movements: Actors, Mechanisms, and Political Effects

Article

Jan 2010

It is widely recognized that social movements may spread – or “diffuse” – from one site to another. Such diffusion, however, is a complex and multidimensional process that involves different actors, networks, and mechanisms. This complexity has spawned a large body of literature on different aspects of the diffusion process, yet a comprehensive framework remains an elusive target. This book is a response to that need, and its framework focuses on three basic analytical questions. First, what is being diffused? This question directs attention to both the protest repertoires and interpretive frames that actors construct to define issues and mobilize political claims. Second, how does diffusion occur? This book focuses attention on the activist networks and communication channels that facilitate diffusion, including dialogue, rumors, the mass media, the internet, NGOs, and organizational brokers. Finally, what is the impact of diffusion on organizational development and shifts in the scale of contentious politics? This volume suggests that diffusion is not a simple matter of political contagion or imitation; rather, it is a creative and strategic process marked by political learning, adaptation, and innovation.

'Movement Schools’ and Dialogical Diffusion of Nonviolent Praxis: Nashville Workshops in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Abstract and Figures

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