1961 Civil Rights Demonstration in front of the Paramount

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On February 1, 1961, John Lewis led more than 300 students in “stand-ins” at four segregated downtown movie theaters on Church Street: the Tennessee, Paramount, Princess, and Loew’s Vendome. The stand-ins were part of a SNCC-led movement to desegregate movie theaters on the one-year anniversary of the Greensboro Sit-Ins. In Nashville, movie theater managers required Black patrons to sit in the upper balconies, if they were allowed to enter the theater at all. In November 1959, the manager of the Belmont Theater, an arthouse theater near Vanderbilt, would not allow three students from Fisk to watch a movie. One of the students was Ashakant Nimbark (1932–2003), a graduate student from India. When two of the Black students, Barbara Johnson and Carolyne Jordan, returned a couple of weeks later, the manager made an exception and allowed them to watch an Ingmar Bergmann-directed film from the balcony.