Diane Judith Nash was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Since her parents served the country during World War II, her father as a clerk, and her mother as a keypunch operator, she lived with her grandmother until she was seven years old. Growing up, she attended Catholic schools and even considered becoming a nun.
After graduating from Hyde Park High School, she studied at Howard University for one year before transferring to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. There, she was exposed to the real impact of Jim Crow laws and experienced racial segregation and discrimination for the first time in her life. She joined workshops and nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights Movement. Soon, she became a leader in the Nashville branch and served as the head organizer of sit-ins at discriminatory restaurants, which began in Nashville and later spread to more than 60 cities across the US. During one of the sit-ins, Nash met her future husband, a fellow protester named James Bevel.
In the spring of 1960, Nash, alongside two hundred students, traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, for a sit-in. There, she co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The organization cooperated with other civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in initiating and organizing various protests throughout the country. Over time, she served in many roles for the SCLC under Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership. Eventually, she left because of its male-dominated leadership structure.
On February 6th, 1961, 23 years old Nash and fellow SNCC leaders got arrested after a sit-in in Rock Hill, South Carolina. In her refusal to pay the $50 fine for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter, as a support of the “Rock Hill Nine,” who’d been arrested the week before for the same crime, she led the agenda of “jail, no bail,” and spent 30 days in jail.
Two months later, Nash headed the SNCC Freedom Rides, a nonviolent protest in which activists rode desegregated buses through southern states to shed light on the non-enforcement of Supreme Court decisions that determined that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. As more buses traveled into the deep south, rioters attacked them and burned the buses, forcing activists to retreat on May 14th, 1961. Despite the pressure of other organizations’ leaders, Nash insisted that the rides continue as planned, saying that “We can’t let them stop us with violence. If we do, the movement is dead.” Under her leadership, the Freedom Rides continued traveling buses for six more months and were the catalyst for the Interstate Commerce Commission’s decision to illegalize any segregated bus travel and terminal.
Later that year, Nash left school and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where she led SCLC campaigns for desegregating public facilities, mainly schools and buses. In 1962, she got arrested for “contributing to the delinquency of minors,” to whom she taught nonviolent tactics to fight for bus desegregation. Six months pregnant, she faced two years in prison, which eventually reduced to 10 days. Together with her husband, she led the Selma to Montgomery marches, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Following the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, Nash returned to Chicago and worked in the public school system. She continued her activism in various fields, including fair housing and welfare support.
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