Movie Review

The film is one episode of a six-part PBS series, "A Force More Powerful," each depicting how nonviolence secured lasting victories in the struggle for racial justice. There is also a separately available companion book, A Force More Powerful, by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall (2000). The production opens with a shot of barbed wire surrounding an enclosure in a desolate area of South Africa; then it moves to a series of still photographs of a young Mohandas Gandhi during his stay in that country. Appropriately, Ben Kingsley provides the narrative and explains the power of nonviolent strategies for confronting oppression.	1
The scene shifts to Nashville, Tennessee, in September 1959 and focuses on the beginnings of the sit-in demonstration downtown. These actions preceded the more celebrated sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. Three civil rights leaders of the Nashville movement provide the narrative with on-camera interviews. James Lawson, a Methodist minister from Ohio, had learned Gandhi's philosophy through study visits to India; he organized the demonstrations, initially using black college students from Fisk University and American Baptist College and eventually including white students as well. His workshops prepared the demonstrators for confrontations with white law enforcement authorities and white citizens determined to maintain segregation with violence, if necessary. Rare footage of Lawson conducting classes augments the narrative.	2
Diane Nash was a college student from Chicago who had enrolled at Fisk. The rigidity of segregation in Nashville and the daily humiliations suffered by the black community there appalled her. At first, she expressed skepticism about nonviolent tactics, but Lawson convinced her that moral weapons could be as effective as violence in overturning Jim Crow.	. . .