The Nonviolent Sit-Ins That Desegregated Nashville’s Lunch Counters
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April 18, 2021, 5:03 AM·16 min read
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via Library of Congress
On April 19, we will commemorate as well we should the twenty-sixth anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But April 19 is also the anniversary of another consequential, albeit lesser known, bombing: On that date in 1960, a bomb went off at the home of Alexander Looby, the Black lawyer representing students and other activists arrested in sit-ins aimed at integrating downtown Nashville. Looby and his family survived, but the bomb blew out 147 windows at a nearby medical college.
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Former President Barack Obama will join the Los Angeles Times Community Book Club April 21 to discuss his memoir “A Promised Land” with filmmaker Ava DuVernay.
The free virtual book club event will stream at 7 p.m. PDT on the Los Angeles Times Facebook page, YouTube and Twitter. Sign up on Eventbrite for direct links.
“A Promised Land” takes readers inside Obama’s improbable journey, from his political awakening at Occidental College, to finding his way as a community organizer and young senator from Chicago, to the day-to-day grind of his grassroots campaign to become the nation’s first Black president.
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The Los Angeles Times Community Book Club is reading “The Promised Land,” the bestselling memoir by former President Barack Obama. This excerpt comes from chapter one, when Obama moves to Los Angeles from Hawaii to attend Occidental College and begins his journey to find a place in the world.
My interest in books probably explains why I not only survived high school but arrived at Occidental College in 1979 with a thin but passable knowledge of political issues and a series of half-baked opinions that I’d toss out during late-night bull sessions in the dorm.
Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for