DEBBIE JACOB
YOU MIGHT only know Nashville from recent reports about its stellar handling of the Covenant School shooting, but if you have ever visited there, you'll know it feels much like the West Indies. The progressive city with a population of about 650,000 in the very conservative US southern state of Tennessee has its own rhythm, energy and music - just like the Caribbean.
Nashville is different from the rest of the South in the way it has dealt with its history of slavery, the civil war and civil rights movement. It also had a West Indian connection like no other city in the southern US during that crucial stage in the civil rights movement.
This is where the brilliant Antiguan lawyer Zephaniah Alexander Looby lived and fought for civil rights from the 1940s through the 1960s. Looby, orphaned in Antigua, arrived in the US on a whaling ship when he was 15. He received a bachelor's degree from Howard University, a Bachelor of Law degree from Columbia University, and a Doctor of Juristic Science from New York University. A doctorate in law for a black person was nearly unheard of in Looby's day.
He is one of the main reasons Nashville never had the attention-grabbing headlines of cities in North and South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. While other civil rights lawyers went through the motion of fighting cases they knew they would lose and waited for those cases to be sent up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court, Looby was winning cases on the ground level.
His most famous case took place in Columbia, Tennessee where he, along with Maurice Weaver, a white lawyer from Chattanooga, and Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice, defended 20 black men accused of murder when a riot broke out after an altercation between a white man and a former black soldier in a store where the soldier's mother had gone to fix a radio. That trio of lawyers got acquittals for all but two of the defendants, who later won on appeals.
Through Looby's legal efforts, Nashvllle had the first integrated lunch counters in the South. If you go to Nashville you see tributes to Looby's work everywhere - from blown-up black and white photos of him in the national award-winning Nashville city library to a community centre named after him and a plaque outside of his house, which was bombed in 1960.
Looby defended all the important student civil rights leaders including Diane Nash, James Bevel and John Lewis, who became an important voice in the House of Representatives where he held a seat for Georgia. They stood by Looby and organised a march to City Hall with over 3,000 students on April 19, 1960 to protest the bombing of Looby's house. He miraculously escaped unharmed.
When Nash confronted Mayor Ben West on the steps of City Hall and asked him if he felt discrimination against blacks was right, he said, 'No, it's not right.' The city backed down from segregated lunch counters instead of the mayor digging in his heels as other southern leaders d
