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Lawson framed the philosophy of the movement this way: "Love is the force by which God binds man to Himself and man to man. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love."
What Lawson was saying was that the students were engaged in an odd kind of war, more heroic and courageous than a violent fit of rage at the massive injustice of the Southern way of life. They would absorb the hatred at the heart of segregation, and through their example they would bring the institution of white supremacy to its knees.
Charles Jones was mesmerized by the notion, and throughout the course of the three-day meeting, he met other students whose enthusiasm was equal to his own. One of those was Diane Nash, a young woman from Fisk University in Nashville who seemed to embody, as much as anybody at the conference, some of the finest ideals of the movement. Many of her peers were struck by her beauty, her large, dark eyes that were gentle and sure, and her manner that at first seemed so unassuming.
In the early days, when she and her friends started meeting in Nashville, planning their first lunch counter sit-ins, she says she was frightened by what they were doing. Growing up in the North, she had seen the horrible photos of Emmett Till, a teenager murdered on a trip to Mississippi when he allegedly said something fresh to a white woman. "I had heard stories of the brutality of the South," she said. "I was duly impressed."
Nevertheless, she became a leader in the Nashville movement, and one day in the spring she confronted the mayor on the steps of City Hall. She demanded to know, as the reporters hovered around taking notes, if he would use the power and prestige of his office to end segregation.
Ben West, one of the most powerful men in Nashville, drew himself up sharply and declared: "I appeal to all citizens to end discrimination, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred."
Nash continued to push. "Then, Mayor, do you recommend that lunch counters be desegregated?"
"Yes," said West, and among people in the movement, it became a legendary moment of triumph.
The Whole South's A Battlefield
Following the meeting at Shaw University, Nash, like Jones, became a leader in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a new organization formed at the conference to coordinate protests throughout the South. Early in 1961, they decided they needed to lend their support to sit-ins taking place in Rock Hill, SC. There, a group of students from Friendship College, led in part by Thomas Gaither, a field organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality, were arrested and sentenced to 30 days hard labor or fines of $100 apiece.
Nine of the students opted for the chain gang.
Their decision came at a time when the civil rights movement all over the South was running low on cash. Thousands of people had been arrested by now, and money for bail was getting harder to raise. In addition, the story was slowly but surely growing stale, as the media and the country began to lose interest. But the specter of students on a Carolina chain gang was something the nation had not yet seen.
It caught the attention of the national press corps, and even more than that, it caught the attention of the leaders in SNCC. At a conference in Atlanta, Charles Jones and the others were deeply moved by the Gandhian example of the Rock Hill students, and immediately set out to join them in jail. The expedition included Jones and Diane Nash and two of the other young sit-in veterans, Charles Sherrod and Ruby Doris Smith.
They were arrested together on February 6, and Nash's mother in Chicago saw it that night on the television news. It was part of the generational agony that was one of the undercurrents of the civil rights movement -- parents who were frightened by the risks and vulnerability of their children, but who also knew that the children were right. Nash did her best to soothe those fears, writing letters home from her cell in the jail. She also wrote a letter to The Rock Hill Herald, the local newspaper, trying to explain the philosophy of the movement.