The Nashville way : racial etiquette and the struggle for social justice in a southern city / Benjamin Houston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Houston, Benjamin

Series:

Politics and culture in the twentieth-century South

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans.

Nashville (Tenn.)--Race relations.

Nashville (Tenn.).

African Americans--Tennessee--Nashville.

Tennessee--Nashville.

Physical Description:

xi, 320 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ga. : University of Georgia Press, [2012]

Summary:

Among Nashville's many slogans, the one that best reflects its emphasis on manners and decorum is the Nashville Way, a phrase coined by boosters to tout what they viewed as the city's amicable race relations. Benjamin Houston offers the first scholarly book on the history of civil rights in Nashville, providing new insights and critiques of this moderate progressivism for which the city has long been credited.

Civil rights leaders such as John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Lawson who came into their own in Nashville were devoted to nonviolent direct action, or what Houston calls the "black Nashville Way." Through the dramatic story of Nashville's 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, Houston shows how these activists used nonviolence to disrupt the coercive script of day-to-day race relations. Nonviolence brought the threat of its opposite-white violence-into stark contrast, revealing that the Nashville Way was actually built on a complex relationship between etiquette and brute force. Houston goes on to detail how racial etiquette forged in the era of Jim Crow was updated in the civil rights era. Combined with this updated racial etiquette, deeper structural forces of politics and urban renewal dictate racial realities to this day. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 A Manner of Segregation: Lived Race Relations and Racial Etiquette 13

2 The Triumph of Tokenism: Public School Desegregation 47

3 The Shame and the Glory: The 1960 Sit-ins 82

4 The Kingdom or Individual Desires?: Movement and Resistance during the 1960s 123

5 Black Power/White Power: Militancy in Late 1960s Nashville 164

6 Cruel Mockeries: Renewing a City 202.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780820343266

0820343269

9780820343273

0820343277

OCLC:

780288751