American Baptist College: The School That Trained the Movement

On the north side of Nashville, along the Cumberland River, sits a small historically Black college that produced an outsized share of the people who changed America. American Baptist College was founded in nineteen twenty-four as a joint venture of Black and white Baptist conventions, training ministers and lay leaders. By the late nineteen fifties it had become something else entirely: the seedbed of the Civil Rights Movement.

The transformation began when a young Methodist minister named James Lawson arrived in Nashville in nineteen fifty-seven. Lawson had spent three years in India studying Gandhian nonviolent resistance techniques, and he began holding workshops at local Black colleges, including American Baptist. Students came from Fisk, Tennessee A and I, and Vanderbilt's divinity school, but the most committed core came from American Baptist itself.

Among them were John Lewis, a sharecropper's son from Alabama who had come to Nashville to study theology, and his roommate Bernard Lafayette, who had traveled north from Tampa. Lewis and Lafayette attended every workshop they could find, learning to endure verbal abuse and physical assault without striking back, practicing the discipline of nonviolent confrontation as a form of moral force.

On February thirteenth, nineteen sixty, students launched coordinated sit-ins at Nashville's downtown lunch counters. American Baptist students were at the center of it. Over the following weeks they were spat on, burned with cigarettes, and dragged from their stools, and they returned every time. Their campaign was one of the best-organized in the South. By May of nineteen sixty, Nashville had desegregated its lunch counters.

Lewis, Lafayette, James Bevel, and other American Baptist students went on to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to ride the Freedom Buses into Alabama, and to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Journalist David Halberstam later wrote that American Baptist College produced more members of Martin Luther King's executive staff than any other institution in the nation.