Black college students stage the first of the Nashville sit-ins at three lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Nashville sit-ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were part of a protest to end racial segregation at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. The sit-in campaign, coordinated by the Nashville Student Movement and the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, was notable for its early success and its emphasis on disciplined nonviolence. It was part of a broader sit-in movement that spread across the southern United States in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina.

A lunch counter or luncheonette is a small restaurant, similar to a diner, where the patron sits on a stool on one side of the counter and the server serves food from the opposite side of the counter, where the kitchen or food preparation area is located. As the name suggests, they were primarily used for the lunch meal. Lunch counters were once commonly located inside variety stores, pharmacies, and department stores in the United States throughout the 20th century. The intent of the lunch counter in a store was to profit from serving hungry shoppers, and to attract people to the store so that they might buy merchandise.

Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, located on the Cumberland River. It is the 21st-most populous city in the United States and fourth-most populous city in the Southeast with a population of 689,447 at the 2020 census, while the Nashville metropolitan area with over 2.15 million people is the 35th-largest metropolitan area in the nation. Nashville is among the fastest-growing cities in the U.S.