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.

Students staged a now-legendary 1960 sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, starting a movement that eventually spread across the South, mobilizing young Black people and their white allies against Jim Crow and demonstrating the power students held.