Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library

The Civil Rights Room is one of the most important places in Nashville and one of the least visited, which is a shame because it takes only half an hour and is free. It sits on the second floor of the downtown Main Library on Church Street, inside the Nashville Room, and it tells the story of the city's nonviolent challenge to segregation — above all the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, when students from Fisk University, Tennessee State, American Baptist College and other schools, trained in nonviolent protest, sat down at segregated downtown lunch counters a few blocks from where the library now stands. Nashville's campaign became a model for the movement, and its young leaders, including Diane Nash and John Lewis, went on to shape the Freedom Rides and the national struggle. The room is designed around a symbolic lunch counter where you can sit, with the Ten Rules of Conduct the protesters followed displayed nearby: be friendly, do not strike back or curse if abused, do not laugh out loud. Black-and-white photographs line the walls, a timeline sets local events against national ones, and next door a video room shows documentary footage. The library's civil rights collection, including oral histories, is available for researchers. It is part of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. Fit: history buffs, first-time visitors who want to understand the city beyond music, and families with older children — it is an ideal, affecting stop between downtown museums. The exhibit is compact, but it repays slow reading, and the photographs of young protesters sitting calmly while being harassed are hard to forget. Even a brief stop gives meaning to the downtown streets you will walk afterward.

The setting gives the room its force. Nashville's sit-ins targeted lunch counters at department and dime stores along the same downtown streets you walk today, and the movement's success — downtown lunch counters began serving Black customers in May 1960, after weeks of protests, arrests, a bombing of a lawyer's home and a mass silent march to City Hall — came earlier than in many Southern cities. The exhibit is concise but well chosen, and sitting at the counter while reading the rules of conduct is a quietly powerful experience.

How to do it well: the room is open whenever the Main Library is open — weekdays, Saturdays and Sunday afternoons — and it costs nothing. Allow thirty to forty-five minutes, including a few minutes in the video room. Groups can arrange guided visits through the library. The library occasionally closes the building for special events, so check its calendar before making a special trip. The library itself, a handsome classical-style building, is worth a wander.

Practicals and fit: the library is on Church Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, a ten-minute walk from Lower Broadway and close to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and the Capitol. Pair it with the National Museum of African American Music on Broadway, the Tennessee State Museum's twentieth-century galleries, or a drive past Fisk University's historic campus, home of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Families with children old enough to understand the history will find it a valuable conversation starter. Readers who want to go further can ask library staff about the Civil Rights Collection, which includes oral histories and documents from the movement in Nashville; it is a research resource rather than an exhibit, but the room is the best introduction to it. Together with the Tennessee State Museum's modern-history galleries, it offers a fuller picture of Nashville's place in American history than the music sites alone, and it rewards visitors who make time for it. Take a moment, after leaving, to walk the nearby downtown blocks where the sit-ins took place; knowing the story changes how those ordinary streets look.