Lost Nashville: First Baptist Church had major role in the civil rights movement

Nashville Tennessean

Just over 60 years ago, The Tennessean printed an iconic photo of a handcuffed Black man being hustled by police out of First Baptist Church at Capitol Hill in Nashville.

It shows the Rev. James M. Lawson, a Vanderbilt University divinity student, who was one of 80 student lunch-counter desegregation demonstrators who city officials filed criminal charges against in March 1960.

The efforts of Lawson, who went on to become an American activist and university professor, and that of the First Baptist Church at Capitol Hill and its congregants played a major role in the civil rights movement.

With an arrest warrant in hand, Nashville police arrested the Rev. James Lawson, center, a divinity student who was expelled from Vanderbilt University, in front of the First Baptist Church on March 4, 1960. Lawson, shaking hands with a supporter, was arrested on charges of conspiring to violate the state's trade and commerce law.

The church at 625 Rosa L Parks Blvd., was led by Pastor Kelly Miller Smith, who moved to Music City in 1951.

Born in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Smith attended what is now Tennessee State University in 1942. He later graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta with a double major in music and religion. In 1945 he received a Master of Divinity degree from Howard University School of Religion.

In 1956 Smith became president of the Nashville NAACP and in 1958, founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Council. Through the NCLC, Smith helped organize and support Nashville sit-ins — a movement that successfully ended racial segregation at the city's lunch counters.

More:60 years ago, Nashville became the first city in the segregated South to integrate lunch counters

In 1969, Smith became assistant dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School - making him the first African American to become a faculty member there.

A protest to end segregation

Tennessean archives show photos, prior to segregation ending, of Vanderbilt's divinity school students parading in front of Kirkland Hall, the university’s administration building, protesting Lawson’s expulsion.

They also show that John I. Harris, acting city judge at the time, signed a warrant charging Lawson and 79 other demonstrators with conspiracy to violate the state’s trade and commerce laws, just before a mass trial of 17 defendants ended a week-long series of disorderly conduct trials.

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., right, talks with fellow students at Vanderbilt Divinity School March 3, 1960, following a protest meeting over his expulsion from the school. Both students and most of the faculty of the divinity school gave the black "sit-in" leader their support. Lawson was scheduled to graduate from the divinity school next June. Eldred Reaney / The Tennessean

Lawson was taken to jail and posted a $500 bond.

He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his Civil Rights activism in 1960, then later went on to serve as a pastor in Los Angeles, Calif., for more than two decades.

Lawson would later return to Nashville, where he continues to live today at age 91.

Smith lost a battle to cancer in 1984 and is buried in Greenwood Cemetary, archives show.

Several Nashville landmarks are named after Smith including Kelly Smith Towers on Cliff Drive in Nashville and The Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies at the Divinity School.

The men's legacy, the church they attended and all they did for the African American community lives on not only in photographs but memories.

Reach Natalie Neysa Alund at nalund@tennessean.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.