Tennessee has a rich civil rights history, and numerous persons affiliated with the Volunteer State have impacted civil rights and social justice throughout the country. Diane Nash is one person who played a major role in facilitating change, and her steadfastness for and impact on civil and human rights is still felt today.
Nash, a native of Chicago with familial roots in Tennessee, became involved in the nonviolent civil rights movement in 1959, as a student at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Chairwoman of the student sit-in movement in Nashville, she was one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an organizer with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Because of her public discourse with then-Mayor Ben West, Nashville became the first Southern city to begin the desegregation of its lunch counters.
In May of 1961, Nash coordinated and revived the Congress of Racial Equality’s aborted Freedom Rides with a band of student activists from colleges and universities in Nashville. The wave of Nashville students boarded a bus headed for Birmingham, then to Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, and to New Orleans, Louisiana. The Freedom Rides culminated with the Interstate Commerce Commission promulgating regulations prohibiting racial segregation in train and bus terminals, which went into effect on November 1, 1961.
An astute tactician, Nash’s ideas were instrumental in initiating the 1963 March on Washington, where she was one of six women honored. Appointed by President John F. Kennedy to a national committee that promoted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she and her former husband, James Bevel, conceptualized and planned the initial strategy for the Selma right-to-vote movement that helped bring about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For her work in the civil rights movement, Nash received SCLC’s highest award in 1965 that was presented by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This living civil rights icon has received numerous awards, including the “Distinguished American Award” presented by the John F. Kennedy Library, the “LBJ Award for Civil Rights” from President Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum “National Freedom Award,” and Fisk University awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree in 2007. Today, Nash spends a great deal of her time lecturing at colleges and universities and continues to be an activist for civil and human rights, as well as for peace issues.
