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"I felt pity" Civil Rights protestor meets policeman years later Vencen Horsley was a student at Tennessee State University who was involved in many protests in Nashville related to integrating restaurants. Here are a couple of excerpts from an interview he did as part of the Nashville Public Library's Civil Rights Project.
"One evening we went into the Hermitage Hotel, where they had a lunch counter. I was sitting at the stool, and they had this policeman . . . I had never been hit so hard in life as he knocked me off the stool. And once my vision cleared up and I looked at him, I thought to myself, 'one day I'm going to get you back for that.'
"Several years later I was down at the courthouse and I saw this man standing out there with a cigarette just hanging on his lips and looking bad. Then I determined that it was that same policeman, and I felt pity. Here was that man who used to be so well groomed and all, and he had deteriorated. I was sad to see that he had deteriorated to that point. " . . . Here's another incident. We were at this place called Candyland [a restaurant with a lunch counter] . . . my group was primarily white. And I noticed that this guy [who was counter-protesting] had a cup. And so I told the young lady who was marching with me, I said, 'you stay on the inside, because they're going to throw something on us.'
"And so something happened . . . Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this coming, but it wasn't coffee. It was urine. And I was embarrassed. They said, 'you all right?' And I said, 'Oh, I'm OK. I'm all right.' After a while you just took it for granted that that's just part of it. That was, you know, just a day's work." (Today, Vencen Horsley lives in Nashville and works for DuPont.) COPYRIGHT -- the Civil Rights Oral History Collection of the Nashville Public Library, Special Collections Division. Click here to be taken to its website.
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©2005-2006 Tennessee History for Kids, Inc. All rights reserved.
All photographs taken by Bill Carey for THKF unless otherwise stated.
All photographs taken by Bill Carey for THKF unless otherwise stated.












