It’s Tuesday, April 19th, 1960. The Pirates have started the season with a four-and-one record and will go on to beat the Yankees in the World Series. Elvis Presley’s “Stuck on You” is topping the charts. John F. Kennedy has taken the first three Democratic primaries – New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Illinois – and looks set to win his party’s nomination. It is spring in America.
Then, in Nashville, a bomb goes off. Some twenty sticks of dynamite nearly destroy one home and shatter well over a hundred windows at Meharry Medical across the street. The intended target? Z. Alexander Looby, a Nashville attorney and city councilman. His crime? Representing the sitin demonstrators desegregating Nashville’s lunch counters.
Two months before the attempted murder – Looby and his wife escaped unharmed – 124 college students, overwhelmingly African American, had had enough of America’s Plessy v. Ferguson nonsense, the Jim Crow laws that resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision, and decided to take a stand by taking a seat. The students occupied several of Nashville’s downtown lunch counters, including the one at Woolworth on 5th. They asked, calmly, to be served, but their dignity was not returned in kind: service was denied, and a more forceful reaction wasn’t long in coming. On February 27th, the day of the fourth sit-in at the Nashville Woolworth, an angry mob dragged their fellow Americans from the lunch counter and forced them out the door amid a storm of kicking, punching, and spitting. It was chaotic and ugly and violent – surely the police would intervene. And they did, arresting the students who had been sitting at the lunch counter. Each was sentenced to a fifty dollar fine and thirty-three days in jail.
The bomb intended for the demonstrators’ lawyer missed Looby, but succeeded in sending Nashville’s segregated lunch counters to history’s dust bin. By happy hour on that April 19th, a crowd of some 4,000 citizens, black and white, had marched on the office of Nashville Mayor Ben West, demanding change. Now. Finding himself suddenly and vastly outnumbered, West heartily agreed: Nashville’s lunch counters would be desegregated.