“Who the hell is Diane Nash?” queried Attorney General Bobby Kennedy in May 1961.
His assistant, John Seigenthaler, had just reported back that he had relayed his message to the students that they could be killed if they continued with the Freedom Rides, and their leader, Diane Nash, had responded that they were willing to die and thus had made out their last wills and testaments.
Indeed, who was this quiet but fiery young leader?
Born and raised in Chicago, Diane Nash was a student at Fisk University in Nashville, where she came under the tutelage of the late James Lawson, the nonviolent protest specialist Martin Luther King had recruited to the South.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, John Lewis and C. T. Vivian were students at American Baptist College in Nashville. Along with Nash, they were members of what has been called the “University of Nonviolence,” taught by James Lawson, a doctoral student at the Vanderbilt Divinity School who had studied Gandhi’s nonviolence in India.
Other students in the University of Nonviolence, facilitated by United Methodist pastor Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, included James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette (seminary students at American Baptist College) and Diane Nash and Marion Berry (Fisk students) – all becoming significant figures in the Civil Rights Movement. This group became a crucial part of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) when it was formed in April 1960. SNCC moved the civil rights movement into the streets.
These students formed the Nashville Student Movement in 1959 and began steps toward a sit-in movement at lunch counters in Nashville. When the famous sit-in occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, students in Nashville wanted to follow suit immediately. After Lawson’s crash course in nonviolence, hundreds of these students held a massive sit-in in downtown Nashville the next day. These students received brutal treatment from the police, who arrested more than 150 students.
In a march to city hall, Diane Nash, the group’s elected spokesperson, famously asked the mayor if he felt discrimination against people of color was wrong. The mayor’s answer was “yes,” leading to the desegregation of the city’s lunch counters.
By the end of February, thirty cities in seven states had sit-in demonstrations. By the end of the spring, sit-ins had taken place in all thirteen southern states and, according to one estimate, involved some 50,000 protesters. What had begun as a bold act of frustration by four college students turned into a full-fledged protest movement.
In April 1960, reacting to the fast growth of the sit-in movement, the veteran civil rights leader Ella Baker suggested a Student Leadership Conference to organize what became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The Nashville students were invited; however, the sit-ins in Nashville continued, so John Lewis opted to stay. Diane Nash went and ended up co-authoring this new organization’s statement of purpose.
The SNCC paper and other contributions made
Diane Nash a key figure in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
