lunch counter

It’s not hard to feel outrage at the sight of sheriffs siccing police dogs on innocent protesters, or gangs of toughs beating Black college students for sitting at a lunch counter.

Paschke sat at the packed lunch counter on a recent afternoon, waiting to pay.

James M. Lawson Jr., a Methodist minister who became the teacher of the civil rights movement, training hundreds of youthful protesters in nonviolent tactics that made the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins a model for fighting racial inequality in the 1960s, has died.

Lawson was a pivotal figure in some of the most important campaigns of the movement, including the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, the first Freedom Ride and the social justice battles he led as pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in L.A.

He showed the students how to run an orderly sit-in by filling lunch counter seats in shifts.