Diane Nash

Her grandmother did the raising until she was seven. Carrie Bolton was a formal, cultured woman who thought racial prejudice was something older people taught to younger ones, and she spent those years making sure Diane knew her own worth. The side effect was a sheltered childhood on the South Side of Chicago — Catholic schools, a spell of considering the convent, a year at Howard, then a transfer to Fisk University in Nashville to read English. Nashville is where the sheltering ended. At the Tennessee State Fair she came up against a restroom marked for Colored Women, the first segregation sign that had ever been pointed at her, and before long she was in James Lawson's workshops learning how to be beaten without hitting back.

She was 22 when she led the Nashville sit-ins from February to May of 1960, the first successful campaign to integrate lunch counters, and it spread to 69 cities. With John Lewis she pushed the tactic of refusing bail. On the steps of City Hall she asked Mayor Ben West whether it was wrong to discriminate against a person on the basis of color, which is a yes-or-no question, and he answered yes. Three weeks later the counters served Black customers. In April 1960 she helped found SNCC at Raleigh and quit Fisk to run its direct-action wing. When CORE called off the Freedom Rides in May 1961 after a mob attack in Birmingham, she loaded Nashville students onto the buses instead, coordinating over a tapped telephone in a code built out of poultry.

In February 1961 she took 30 days in a South Carolina jail rather than pay a 50-dollar fine, telling the judge that paying would amount to supporting the arrest. The next year, four months pregnant, she faced two years in a Mississippi prison for encouraging minors to become Freedom Riders. She spent two days praying and then wrote an open letter refusing to fight it, on the grounds that going to jail now might hasten the day her child was free. The court gave her 10 days in Jackson, where she washed her only set of clothes in the sink and listened to cockroaches overhead at night. She later cut ties with the SCLC over a leadership that was male, clerical and closed. Her marriage to James Bevel ended in 1968 after seven years, and she did not marry again.

She went home to Chicago, worked in education and real estate, and campaigned for fair housing. The credit came late and mostly from other people. David Halberstam, writing in 1995, called her focused and fearless and said her tactical instincts had been flawless. In December 2021 Nashville named the courthouse landing where she cornered Mayor West the Diane Nash Plaza, an earlier attempt on the park having failed because the city will not name parks for the living. Joe Biden gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in July 2022. She had gone to Selma's 50th anniversary in 2015 and refused to walk in the restaged march, because George W. Bush was walking in it.

Diane Nash's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Nashville sit-ins other
  February to May — the first successful campaign to integrate lunch counters, copied in 69 cities 1960
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee company
  Co-founded at Raleigh in April and deliberately kept independent of the adult organizations 1960
• The continuation of the Freedom Rides other
  She refilled the buses after CORE suspended the rides 1961
• Open letter on going to jail while pregnant article
  Her refusal to fight a two-year Mississippi sentence 1962
• The Alabama Project other
  The proposal for a nonviolent voting-rights army that became the Selma campaign 1963

• May 15, 1938 aged 0 Born in Chicago Her grandmother Carrie Bolton raised her until she was seven.
• Late 1950s aged ~21 Transfers from Howard to Fisk University in Nashville The article gives the sequence but not the year. She majored in English.
• 1960 aged ~22 Leads the Nashville sit-ins at 22 They ran from February to May and were copied in 69 cities.
• April 1960 aged 21 Co-founds SNCC at Raleigh and leaves Fisk to run its direct-action wing
• February 1961 aged 22 Serves 30 days in a South Carolina jail rather than pay a fine Jail, no bail — the tactic she and John Lewis pushed.
• May 1961 aged 22 Restarts the Freedom Rides after CORE suspends them She told John Seigenthaler the students had already signed their wills.
• 1962 aged ~24 Sentenced in Mississippi while four months pregnant She refused to appeal. The court gave her 10 days.
• September 1963 aged 25 Proposes an Alabama voting-rights campaign after the Birmingham church bombing SCLC leadership rebuffed her. It became Selma anyway.
• July 2022 aged 84 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom

• John Lewis 1940–2020
  Freedom Rider and congressman whose activism was central to the civil-rights movement and voting-rights legislation. organized alongside
• Ella Baker 1903–1986
  Grassroots organizer who helped found the SNCC and shaped the civil rights movement behind the scenes. advised the students to stay independent
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. pressed him to back the riders
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. his office tried to stop the rides
• Bayard Rustin 1912–1987
  Civil rights strategist who organized the 1963 March on Washington and championed LGBTQ and labor rights. strategist of the same movement
• Fannie Lou Hamer 1917–1977
  Civil rights activist whose testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention exposed racist voting suppression. took the voting-rights fight into Mississippi