Diane Nash

• Date of birth: May 15, 1938
• Place of birth: Chicago, Illinois

Civil rights activist

Diane Nash’s strategic leadership, courage, and commitment to nonviolent protest against injustice helped bring down segregation in the South during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Her life’s work attests to the power of individual action combined with nonviolent social activism.

Area of achievement: Civil rights

Early Life

Diane Judith Nash grew up an only child in a middle-class Chicago family. Her father, Leon Nash, was a dentist. Her mother, Dorothy Bolton Nash, worked as a data processor. The family lived a comfortable life that shielded Nash from the harshest aspects of racism. She was particularly adored by her maternal grandmother, who taught Nash to be proud of who she was. Outside her home, however, Nash encountered racist attitudes. A teacher at her Roman Catholic school referred to the Black and American Indian students as “the least of God’s people.” As a teen, Nash was denied admission to a modeling program because of her race. Despite these two events, Nash prospered in her youth, and racial discrimination remained a minor issue in her family life.

After Nash’s parents divorced, her mother married John Baker, a Pullman waiter who traveled the country. To the family, Baker brought stories of segregation in the South. In Chicago, however, Nash could eat and shop in the department stores and sit wherever she wanted in the movie theaters. An attractive girl, Nash entered Chicago’s Miss America pageant, finishing as a runner-up. After high school, she attended Howard University in Washington, DC, but later transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. There, the injustice and inequality she had only heard about became an everyday reality. Faced with “Colored” and “Whites only” signs in public facilities, Nash decided to join with others fighting against segregation. The decision thrust her into the growing civil rights movement and ultimately into history as one of its most fearless, if sometimes overlooked, leaders.

Life’s Work

Nash attended workshops in nonviolent protest taught by Vanderbilt divinity student James Lawson. She and other Nashville-area students formed the Nashville student movement. In February 1961, the group began sit-ins and other protests of the city’s segregation policies. The well-dressed, respectful Black and White college students drew national attention to their lunch counter sit-ins when local White residents attacked them and police arrested the peaceful protesters. Nash at times doubted her courage to confront the government and corporate forces allied with segregation. However, the pride her family instilled in her, the months of nonviolence training, and her growing conviction that segregation harmed the human spirit fueled her determination and perseverance. On April 20, she lead a march to City Hall to protest the bombing of a Black lawyer’s home. There, with news cameras rolling, Nash asked Mayor Ben West whether he thought racial discrimination was fair. The mayor admitted he did not. This became a turning point in the movement. Within days of the march, integration of Nashville lunch counters began.

That same year, Nash became a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was the first paid field-worker for both SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She traveled extensively, conducting nonviolence training workshops and rallying support. In Rock Hill, North Carolina, she was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in jail. When she emerged, the English major dropped out of Fisk and began coordinating communication for the Freedom Rides, which, after violent opposition by southern mobs, ended segregation on interstate buses and in bus stations throughout the South.

Nash married James Bevel, a minister and fellow SCLC staffer, and they began registering Black voters and conducting nonviolent workshops in Mississippi. While jailed for her activities in 1962, she refused to post bail or contest her incarceration, even though she was six months pregnant. This illustration of her resolve and courage brought her more visibility and responsibility within the movement. She and Bevel orchestrated the Birmingham Children’s March and initiated plans for a march for voting rights from Selmato Montgomery, Alabama, which led to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. She left the SNCC that year.

After Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in 1968 and her divorce from Bevel, Nash returned to Chicago. A single parent of two children, she worked as a social worker and an educator and then in real estate. She struggled financially yet remained an activist, protesting housing discrimination and the Vietnam War and working for women’s rights.

In the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, Nash traveled and lectured about her involvement in the civil rights movement, highlighting her nonviolent beliefs and urging others to take action against oppression. She has also appeared on television and in films, including the award-winning documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 (1987–90) and the Spike Lee film 4 Little Girls (1997); she was also depicted in the 2014 dramatic film Selma. Nash also helped organize a commemoration of activists James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner, who were murdered during Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

Significance

Nash was involved in every major civil rights movement protest during the 1960s. In 1963, she was one of six women honored as freedom fighters at the March on Washington. In subsequent decades, Nash continued to espouse and practice the principles of nonviolence and social justice that she had learned in Lawson’s workshops and adopted as guides for her life. She served as a role model and inspiration for later civil rights activists, such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Nash's contributions have brought her recognition since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In 1965, she and Bevel shared the SCLC's Rosa Parks Award. Nash has also received the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library's 2003 Distinguished American Award, the 2004 LBJ Award for Leadership in Civil Rights, a 2008 National Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum, and honorary degrees from Fisk University and the University of Notre Dame. Fisk's John Lewis Center for Social Justice also created an endowed professorship and a scholarship in honor of her, and Nash was a subject of the 2020 operatic performance One Vote Won.

In further recognition of her years of contributions to societal change, Nash was one of the honorees presented with a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden at the White House in 2022.

Bibliography

“Diane Nash, Civil Rights Icon, to Speak at Northwestern.” Northwestern News, Northwestern University, 23 Apr. 2019, www.sesp.northwestern.edu/news-center/news/2019/04/diane-nash-civil-rights-icon-to-speak-at-northwestern.html. Accessed 21 July 2021. ‌

Halberstam, David. The Children. Random House, 1998.

Lartey, Jamiles. "Diane Nash: 'Non-Violent Protest Was the Most Important Invention of the 20th Century.'" The Guardian, 6 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/apr/06/diane-nash-non-violent-protest-civil-rights-gandhi-martin-luther-king. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.

Nash, Diane. “Inside the Sit-ins and Freedom Rides: Testimony of a Southern Student.” In The New Negro, edited by Mathew H. Ahmann. Biblio and Tannen, 1969.

“Nash, Diane, 1938–.” Civil Rights Digital Library. Digital Library of Georgia, 2020, crdl.usg.edu/people/n/nash‗diane‗1938/. Accessed 21 July 2021.

Olson, Lynne. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. Simon & Schuster, 2001.