Nash, Diane (1938-…), is a leader in the United States civil rights movement. She was a key organizer of nonviolent demonstrations protesting segregation in the South in the early 1960’s. Segregation is the forced separation of racial groups.
Diane Judith Nash was born on May 15, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois, in the Midwestern United States. She attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., before transferring to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the Southern United States. Nash, an African American, had her first experiences with extensive, overt (open) segregation while studying in Nashville. At that time, many facilities in the United States, especially in the South, were racially segregated. Black people were prohibited from using accommodations reserved for white people. Nash began to attend workshops on nonviolent resistance to segregation, taught by James Lawson, a student at the Divinity School of nearby Vanderbilt University. Some of the students established the Nashville Student Movement.
In February 1960, Nash and other members of the Nashville Student Movement began a boycott of “whites only” sections of stores in the city. Nash and others negotiated with a number of business owners who had feared that ending segregation would lead to boycotts from white customers. By May, several stores desegregated their lunch counters. Also in 1960, Nash attended the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which organized peaceful protests against segregation. In 1961, she was jailed for participating in a SNCC “ sit-in” at a segregated lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She was later jailed dozens of times for her participation in other protests. Nash won acclaim for her leadership of “freedom rides” protesting discrimination on buses and in bus terminals in Alabama and Mississippi.
Nash’s activism included work with the civil rights groups Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC). She worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders on desegregation and voting rights campaigns in Alabama, Mississippi, and other Southern states. In the late 1960’s, Nash returned to Chicago. She continued to work as an activist, organizing for tenants’ rights and women’s rights and teaching others about the philosophy of nonviolent protest.
