Diana Nash was a pivotal figure in the student movement of the 1960s. As a student at Fisk University in 1960, she led the student sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. She was also pivotal in the strategy to refuse to pay bail. It was her question to the Mayor of Nashville on the steps of City Hall that got him to admit that it is immoral to discriminate based on the color of skin. With his virtual sanctioning of the protests, resistance faded and less than a month later, Black people were served at lunch counters in Nashville.
Nash is responsible for much more than student sit-ins, however. In 1960, along with John Lewis, a fellow Fisk University student, Nash founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which played as much a role in shaping the movement of the 60s as did Martin Luther King, Jr. Preferring the real world to the sanitized world of academia, as she saw it, Nash dropped out of school and became a full-time, paid organizer with SNCC, leading its direct action wing. Her salary was $25 a week, just enough to rent a room at the local YWCA. Fully-dedicated to social change, she also became an architect of stand-ins, an assault on segregated movie theaters.
She played a huge role in voter registration drives throughout the South. In 1961, she helped revive the Freedom Rides, refusing to allow the brutal violence against the previous riders to control their fight for justice. Nash led a huge contingent of Nashville students from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama and then to Jackson, Mississippi. The renewed Freedom Rides forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to make the Interstate Commerce Commission issue tough new guidelines to twart segregation in interstate travel facilities. The photo above was taken at the lunch counter in a Greyhound bus station, Nash is second from the right.
Her list of activities is quite impressive. Organizer of the 1963 March on Birmingham. Appointed by President Kennedy to the committee that led to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Held several positions with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1961-1965. In 1965, King awarded her the highest award from the SCLC, the Rosa Parks Award.
Despite dozens of arrests, including being sentenced, while she was pregnant, to a two-year prison term for teaching nonviolent tactics to children, Nash never gave up. She eventually moved back to her hometown of Chicago, where she dedicated her life to raising her kids as a single mother, but never left the fight for a better world. I believe she continues to reside there today.
