Water Hoses and a Lawsuit That Changed America

In February of nineteen sixty, high school students in Nashville and Greensboro, North Carolina, were staging lunch counter sit-ins to protest segregation. The movement spread quickly. In Chattanooga, students at Howard High School took notice. Class president Paul Walker, Lehman Pierce, and as many as two hundred other young Black students organized their own peaceful sit-ins at four businesses along a single block in downtown Chattanooga.

White youth mobs gathered and responded with harassment and violence. The protest held. By the third day, Mayor Rudy Olgiati ordered the fire department to use water hoses on the crowd. Chattanooga was the first American city on record to use fire hoses against civil rights protesters. The tactic did not succeed in dispersing the movement. Three months later, the city agreed to desegregate the targeted downtown businesses.

Twenty years later, in April of nineteen eighty, three Ku Klux Klan members drove down East Ninth Street, the historic African-American commercial district, and opened fire on five Black women who were waiting at a bus stop. The women were Viola Ellison, Lela Mae Evans, Katherine Johnson, Opal Lee Jackson, and Fannie Crumsey. All five survived. An all-white jury acquitted the three men of the criminal charges. Chattanooga erupted in four nights of rioting.

The five women did not accept the acquittal as the final word. They became plaintiffs in a federal civil lawsuit against the Klan. In nineteen eighty-two, a federal court ordered the Klan to pay them five hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. That verdict established a legal strategy that civil rights attorneys then used against Klan organizations throughout the country, bankrupting several chapters over the following decade.