Two employees of a downtown cafe in Nashville, Tennessee, formed a human barricade, November 25, 1962, to keep black sit-in demonstrators from entering. Shortly before the action shown above, the owner, Herschel Erwin, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for squirting a fire extinguisher at the demonstrators.
It snowed across Tennessee this week, which is a bigger deal than it sounds. The weather might have been nature's way of reminding Tennesseans that what is rare is also memorable.
Like the subzero peculiarity of this month, February of 1960 was also unforgettable in Nashville - or should have been. Though it snowed then too, something much bigger happened in the city now best known as the capital of country music, something that would before long thrust the whole country into a second civil war.
At noon on Feb. 13, 1960, more than 100 black Nashville college students quietly sat down at three department-store lunch counters and waited to be served, which, of course, never happened. That privilege was reserved for whites only. Despite the racist taunts of white customers, the silent militants - faithful to Gandhi's principles of non-violent protest and well practised after months of secret rehearsals - never flinched.
On the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins, the short stretch of Fifth Avenue where it all occurred seems strangely oblivious to its pivotal place in shaping the city and, indeed, the nation. The lunch counters, like the department stores that housed them, are gone. There are no markers here to remind Nashvillians of the specific injustices that were inflicted on some of their citizens not that long ago.
Mary Jackson, 56, has not forgotten. Growing up in all-black north Nashville, she experienced what life in a segregated city was all about. She never had a white classmate, much less a white friend. She wondered why water fountains came in pairs - one marked "whites," the other "coloreds" - but her mother just shushed her for asking. A school trip to the plantation of president Andrew Jackson, a slave owner, ended when a group of white children also on a visit to the historical site started spitting on her and her classmates.
Surely that's all changed?
"Some. Not enough," says Ms. Jackson, her soft voice betraying not a hint of resentment. "A lot of us black people hold back. There's a barrier there. You always have to be worried about saying something [that will be perceived as]negative [by a white person] saying something out of place."
The election of a black president has not altered that fact. Then again, Ms. Jackson, a security guard at the Tennessee State Museum who has no health insurance, never thought it alone could. To all those who expected the first black commander-in-chief to reverse, or at least neutralize, the racial balance of power in America, the magnanimously minded Ms. Jackson retorts that no president should ever play favourites.
Black leaders across the country have not shown the same patience toward Barack Obama. With black unemployment at 16.5 per cent nationally in January, compared to 8.7 per cent among whites, even African-American members of the President's own party have openly criticized him for failing to show a bit of racial bias of his own.
Indeed, no group has borne the ravages of the recession more than black workers, and the Congressional Black Caucus has repeatedly pressed Mr. Obama to enact stimulus measures reserved explicitly for them. The President has just as repeatedly demurred.
If the civil-rights movement had attained its ultimate objectives, Mr. Obama would not have to answer to such criticism at all. Those who participated in the Nashville sit-ins were not, as a first order of business, seeking economic equality between whites and blacks. But the fact that such glaring socio-economic inequality endures is a reminder that the legacy of the Nashville sit-ins remains incomplete.
In the two weeks before the Nashville demonstrations, a series of isolated protests had occurred in North Carolina, none attracting more than a few brave souls. Nashville was a game-changer. In the weeks after the Feb. 13 demonstration, the sit-ins multiplied - in Nashville itself, but also in dozens of U.S. cities. Hundreds joined in. The reaction of some Nashville whites went from mumbling slurs to spitting on the protesters, dousing them with beer, butting out cigarettes on their scalps and, ultimately, dynamiting the home of their lawyer.
Frustration at the backlash among whites that accompanied whatever change African Americans wrenched from their government would lead to race riots across the United States. But in Nashville, Gandhi's followers never strayed from their peaceful path.
"You have to do more than just not hit back. You have to have no desire to hit back. You have to love that person who's hitting you."
Those were the instructions of James Lawson, the 31-year-old divinity student who organized and trained the protesters, after spending a year in India and studying Gandhi's work. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Nashville to witness the sit-ins, as he described it, "not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration."
Indeed, coming before the "freedom rides" protesting against segregated waiting rooms in bus stations in the South and Mr. King's 1963 March on Washington, the Nashville sit-ins marked the true beginning of the "second phase" of the U.S. civil-rights movement. The legal challenges of the 1950s culminated in a Supreme Court ruling ordering an end to segregated schools. But real change was slow in coming - until Nashville.
It is perhaps because Tennessee's overwhelmingly white majority gave in to that change only grudgingly (the downtown lunch counters were opened to blacks in May, 1960, largely because retailers thought the publicity was bad for business) that the Nashville sit-ins remain an underappreciated moment in the state's history. Until 1995, when a small plaque was hung inside City Hall, there was no official recognition of the event.
Even the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins is being commemorated, to the chagrin of local black leaders, in an understated manner. No major celebrations, no monuments to unveil. There's a Feb. 22 symposium at Vanderbilt University, but that's an academic affair.
In one way, Tennesseans' low-key approach to the anniversary may be testimony to the advances in the collective mindset since Jim Crow laws were overridden by president Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the doctrine of "separate but equal" that served as the legal (and moral) underpinning for segregation was repudiated.
For Paulette Fox, 60, that "progress" shows up in the people turning out for We Shall Not Be Moved, an exhibit about the sit-ins that recently opened at the state museum, with Rev. Lawson, now 81 and living in California, flying in for the event.
"Even the adults who come out don't realize how bad segregation was," explains Ms. Fox, the museum's director of public programs. "They say, 'You mean [blacks]couldn't even try on clothes or shoes before buying them? Or they couldn't return them if they didn't fit?' "
"The fact that within a single lifetime people have already forgotten says something both positive and negative," opines Graham Perry, the curator who assembled the exhibit of photos, news footage and artifacts, which include some of the original lunch-counter stools.
When Ms. Fox went through the public school system in the 1960s, she was taught that the Civil War was fought over states' rights, not slavery. A decade and a half later, Mr. Perry "had two paragraphs on Martin Luther King." Slavery and Mr. King are no longer given such short shrift in the school curriculum.
A group of seventh graders - all white - who toured the exhibit impressed Ms. Fox with their sensitivity toward the injustices inflicted on blacks in the past: "They're very respectful."
In 2006, Tennessee almost elected its first black U.S. senator - and only the fourth in the country - when Harold Ford Jr. garnered 48 per cent of the popular vote. The close race stunned the national pundits, who perhaps ignored the fact that the smooth-talking Mr. Ford could probably have charmed the pants off even George Wallace, the South's late segregationist diehard.
Still, if overt racism is taboo in today's Tennessee, more than two centuries of social and economic inequality have conspired to allow a form of segregation to endure. The unemployment rate among black men in the state stands at around 28 per cent, three times the rate for white men. The state's school system, like its city neighbourhoods, are largely monotone.
Like its languorous summers, social attitudes move slowly in the South. Mr. Ford, who has since moved to New York, where he is mulling a primary challenge to Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, last week conceded that the racially charged anti-Obama innuendo that surfaced in Tennessee during the 2008 election played a part in his decision to leave his home state.
"There was so much racial stuff out of Tennessee on Obama," he told The New York Times. "I'm in an interracial marriage. ... I think my marriage is more accepted here than it would be in Tennessee."
In 2008, Mr. Obama won only six of Tennessee's 95 counties. His biggest margins were in Davidson and Shelby counties, home to Nashville and Memphis, respectively, and the largest concentrations of black and progressive voters. Elsewhere in Tennessee, Republican John McCain steamrolled over Mr. Obama, winning more than 70 per cent of the popular vote in 15 counties and taking 57 per cent statewide.
It is impossible to know how much of the Republican vote was racially motivated. Tennessee remains one of the more conservative states in the Union. It considers itself the heart of the Bible belt, where it's a non-starter to even debate gay and abortion rights. Virtually all of the Democrats here are Blue Dogs, with four of the state's five Democratic congressmen belonging to the party's so-named conservative faction.
The only liberal Democrat, Congressman Steve Cohen, who is white and Jewish, is currently the subject of a primary challenge by former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, who is black. Mr. Herenton's black campaign manager recently told a Memphis radio station that the only congressional district in the state where an African American stands more than a snowball's chance of winning should be "set aside for people who look like me."
This is not what you would call invoking the spirit of Mr. King, who dreamed of the day when Americans would be judged for the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Yet were it not for the events in Nashville 50 years ago, that dream would surely be an even more distant one today.
We Shall Not Be Moved continues at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville through May 16.