Nashville Student Movement Office

This intersection marks the location of the former headquarters of the Nashville Student Movement (NSM) established October 1959. Led by students committed to the ethos of direct action and civil disobedience, as taught by the Reverend James Lawson, the Nashville Student Movement embraced the zeal and spirit of the era as a means to dismantle Jim Crow in Nashville. Students from American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University) often at risk of life and injury, staged sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other forms of protest that disrupted life in Nashville and the segregated South. Through their actions, not only in Nashville, they compelled the nation to begin the desegregation of its many public spaces. Well-known members of the Nashville Student Movement included Marion Barry, the first president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and Diane Nash.