Diane Nash
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- In full:
- Diane Judith Nash
- Also Known As:
- Diane Judith Nash
- Awards And Honors:
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (2022)
Diane Nash (born May 15, 1938, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) is an American civil rights activist who was a leading figure in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, especially known for her involvement in sit-ins and the Freedom Rides. Nash’s efforts contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Early life and education
Nash grew up in Chicago as the daughter of Dorothy (née Bolton) Nash and Leon Nash; the couple later divorced. She had a middle-class upbringing and was educated in both public and Roman Catholic schools. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., for a year and then transferred to Fisk University in Nashville. She graduated with an English degree in 1961.
Activism
Having grown up in Chicago, Nash had had little experience with racial segregation. However, that changed while in Nashville, and she later said, “Every time I obeyed a segregation rule, I felt like I was somehow agreeing I was too inferior to go through the front door or to use the facility that the ordinary public would use.” In 1959 she began attending workshops led by civil rights activist James Lawson, who taught nonviolent resistance. Although initially a skeptic, Nash became a staunch believer in nonviolent tactics.
About this time, Nash became the leader of the Student Central Committee, which was staging a series of sit-ins at segregated store lunch counters and other facilities in Nashville’s downtown area. Although the events drew media attention, most businesses remained segregated. Nash took the issue to Nashville Mayor Ben West, and she served on the biracial committee he established to study the issue. Nash’s efforts paid off in May 1960, when Nashville began integrating its lunch counters. It was the first city in the segregated South to do so.
In 1960 Nash became one of the original members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The following year she and other SNCC members staged a sit-in in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and were arrested. It was the first of a number of times that Nash was jailed for her activism. She was a vocal advocate of the “jail, no bail” strategy, which called for people to serve time instead of paying bail to be released. It was thought that staying in jail would bring more attention to the cause. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., later said that Nash was the “driving spirit in the nonviolent assault on segregation at lunch counters.”
While continuing to stage sit-ins throughout the South, in 1961 Nash coordinated the Freedom Rides, in which Blacks and whites rode buses together to protest segregation in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel. The riders sought to provoke the federal government into enforcing Supreme Court rulings that barred segregated interstate bus travel. When one of the Freedom Ride buses was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan, Nash insisted that the rides continue, saying, “We can’t let violence overcome.” The Freedom Rides proved successful, as the U.S. federal government intervened and enforced stricter guidelines to uphold the Court’s decisions.
Nash married fellow student activist James Bevel in 1961 and later joined him on the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which had been cofounded by King. They were involved in the 1963 March on Washington to protest racial discrimination, and Nash was one of six female civil rights activists honored during the event, though she was not there. In 1965 the couple also had a role in the Selma March for voting rights. Nash and Bevel had two children before divorcing in 1968.
In the late 1960s Nash returned to Chicago. There she became a public school teacher while remaining involved in activism. She participated in protests against the Vietnam War, and she also worked for feminist causes. In the 1970s she became active in such issues as housing and welfare.
Legacy and awards
Nash played a key role in the civil rights movement, organizing campaigns that were central to the cause. Her efforts helped raise national awareness about segregation in the South and contributed to the passage of two landmark pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nash has been the recipient of numerous awards. In 1965 the SCLC granted her its highest honor, the Rosa Parks Award. Nash also received the Distinguished American Award from the John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation in 2003. The following year she was given the LBJ Award for Leadership in Civil Rights from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Nash was also the recipient of the National Civil Rights Museum’s Freedom Award, in 2008. In 2022 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.