"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.