causing pipelines to burst. Many Nashville residents lacked both electricity and water. Due to the severity of the ice storm and the blizzard that followed afterward, this is known as the worst episode of winter weather in Nashville's history. The blizzard of 1951 holds third place for the most snow recorded in Nashville from a single storm system, behind the blizzard of 1892 and Winter Storm Jonas in 2016. Nashville was a center of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957, public schools began to be desegregated using the "stair-step" plan as proposed by Dan May; people protested integration and, at Hattie Cotton Elementary School, a bomb was detonated. No one was killed, and after that the desegregation plan went on without violence. The school board gerrymandered the school districts so that only nine black first-graders enrolled out of about 100 that were eligible. Seven years later, fewer than 800 black students were in formerly all-white schools while black teachers and principals faced demotions or layoffs as the city consolidated the system. On February 13, 1960, hundreds of college students involved in the Nashville Student Movement launched a sit-in campaign to desegregate lunch counters throughout the city. Inspired by students in Greensboro, North Carolina, students from Fisk, the American Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tennessee A&I had similar sit-in protests and boycotts in Nashville. Although initially met with violence and arrests, the protesters were eventually successful in pressuring local businesses to end the practice of racial segregation. Many of the activists involved in the Nashville sit-ins—including James Bevel, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis and others—went on to organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which emerged as one of the most influential organizations of the civil rights movement. The first movement credited to SNCC was the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, directed and strategized by James Bevel, which desegregated the city's theaters. Inspired by their example, Nashville has had a consolidated city-county government (also known as a "metropolitan government") since 1963. Although a similar proposal had failed in 1958, Davidson County voters approved consolidation in a referendum on June 28, 1962. On April 16, 1998, an F3 tornado struck the downtown area at around 3:30 p.m., causing serious damage and blowing out hundreds of windows from skyscrapers, raining shattered glass on the streets and closing the business district for nearly four days. Over 300 homes were damaged, and three cranes at the