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My maternal grandmother was not a bigot. By this, I simply mean that she was not the kind of person who would have verbally assaulted black children on their way into newly-desegregated schools.
But when the sit-ins began in Nashville in February of 1960, though she would have never joined the white mobs who poured milkshakes on the heads of protesters or put out cigarettes on their bare skin, she was no more supportive of those activists than the whites who did all that and more.
The sit-ins were the very model of peaceful protest. They have been heralded as such by historians and movement strategists around the world ever since. And yet, the moral weight of their non-violent tactics did not move her. Though a decent and kind woman in her better moments, she was from the standard Southern school of thought at the time, which, it should be noted, enrolled not merely southerners. It was a school whose white students had learned to leave well enough alone and who never could ascertain what all the fuss was about.
So when the movement emerged that February, my grandmother, as the story goes, expressed her displeasure, even if only within her own home. Not because there had been violence from the…
