Civil Rights Room and Greyhound/Trailways Bus Stations

You’re now at our beautiful library, completed in 2001. There are public restrooms and free Wi-Fi if you need to take a break. For more on the library visit our Capitol and Church, Civic and Public Spaces, and women’s history tours on Nashville Sites. Now let’s go up to the second floor to the Special Collections or Nashville Room. Turn to your left to visit the powerful and permanent exhibit called the Civil Rights Room.

Special Collections Director Andrea Blackman writes: “The Civil Rights Room is a space for education and exploration of the Civil Rights Collection. The materials exhibited here capture the drama of a time when thousands of African-American citizens in Nashville sparked a nonviolent challenge to racial segregation in the city and across the South…The Civil Rights Room overlooks the intersection of Church Street and Seventh Avenue North, where nonviolent protests against segregated lunch counters took place. Visitors can sit at the symbolic lunch counter and read the ‘Ten Rules of Conduct’ used by student protesters and examine the timeline of local and national events. Black and white photographs surround the room, illuminating dramatic events in this period of Nashville’s history. See parents leading their first-grade children past angry protesters, a bombing meant to intimidate those who were challenging segregation, and a peaceful confrontation between Mayor Ben West and African-American student leaders.”

Once you reach the Civil Rights Room, press pause until you are ready to walk to the next stop, which features a historic marker erected in honor of the late John Lewis. You can listen to the rest of this stop as you walk around the block to reach the former site of Nashville’s bus stations.

Now let’s walk and listen as we make our way to the John Lewis historic marker. Exit the library’s front entrance, turn LEFT and then LEFT again onto 7th Avenue North. Walk down the hill and turn LEFT onto Commerce Avenue. The marker will be on your right.

Another major series of events connects Nashville to the desegregation of buses and the Freedom Riders movement. This area is the former site of the Greyhound and Trailways bus stations at a time when bus travel was very common, and very segregated across the South. In 1953, Sarah Louise Keys, a Black female soldier in the Women Army Corps, refused to give her seat to a white Marine while riding a Trailways bus from New Jersey to North Carolina. Afterward, she filed a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission, and in 1955, they broke with the 60-year-old precedent of “separatebut equal” set by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. This landmark case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, banned the segregation of Black passengers traveling by bus across state lines. The ruling was publicly announced one week before Rosa Parks defied local bus segregation laws in Montgomery, AL.

Despite the 1955 ICC ruling, bus stations across the South remained segregated, especially in the facilities within the bus terminals. On March 2, 1960, over 50 Nashville students staged a sit-in at the segregated Post House Restaurant located inside the Greyhound Bus Terminal on Sixth Avenue and Commerce Street. They were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. On March 16, 1960, four black students—Matthew Walker Jr., Peggy Alexander, Diane Nash, and Stanley Hemphill—ate at the Post House Restaurant, the first time African Americans were served at a “white” lunch counter in Nashville.

From the corner of Sixth and Commerce, look across the street to where the Greyhound and Trailways bus stations stood in the 1950s and 60s. Learn more about Nashville student activist John Lewis as you stand here, or cross Commerce St. and turn LEFT to reach the John Robert Lewis historical marker.