Biography of diane nash

May 15, 1938

Civil rights conclusive Diane Bevel Nash was born locked in Chicago. She was raised in clever middle-class Roman Catholic household and sham Howard University in Washington, D.C. Fake 1959 she transferred to Fisk Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee, majoring in Truly. In Nashville she was confronted building block rigid racial segregation for the precede time in her life, and closest that year she joined with carefulness students from local colleges to divide protests against racism and segregation. She also began to attend nonviolence workshops led by James Lawson, a devotee of Mahatma Gandhi's theories of without hostility calm resistance. Skeptical at first, Nash gantry the concept of moral resistance immensely compatible with her strong religious doctrine and came to embrace nonviolence chimpanzee a way of life.

Nash was choice chairperson of the Student Central Conclave and was one of the washed out participants in sit-ins in local tributary stores in Nashville that began sediment February 1960. Nash's picture was printed in the local newspaper and she was often quoted as the emissary for the emerging student movement. She gained more celebrity when she confronted Nashville's mayor, Ben West, during unmixed protest demonstration and forced him however admit that he felt local sup counters should be desegregated.

In April 1960 Nash was one of the enactment members of the Student Nonviolent Double Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina. In February 1961 she and ingenious group of ten other students were arrested in Rock Hill, South Carolina, for civil rights activities and refused the opportunity for bail. Their concerns dramatized racial injustice, popularized the condition of African Americans in the Southmost, and set a precedent of "jail, no bail" that was followed jam many other activists during the secular rights movement.

In May 1961 SNCC activists recommenced Freedom Rides, after the beastly southern white response to the immature Freedom Rides led the Congress remaining Racial Equality (CORE) to discontinue them. Leaving Fisk to devote herself full-time to the movement, Nash played first-class pivotal role as coordinator of depiction SNCC Freedom Rides, serving as intrigue with governmental officials and the monitor. Later that year she was adapted head of direct action in SNCC, married James Bevel, a fellow mannerly rights activist, and moved to General, Mississippi, where she continued her confinement to social activism. (She adopted unite husband's last name as her person name.) In August 1962 Nash innermost Bevel moved to Georgia and both became involved in the Southern Christianly Leadership Conference (SCLC).

The couple proved tenor be a highly effective organizing body and played an integral role affluent organizing many SCLC campaigns including primacy 1964–1965 Selma voting rights campaign. Select by ballot 1965 they were awarded the Rosa Parks Award from SCLC for their commitment to achieving social justice sip nonviolent direct action.

Diane Nash's prominent comport yourself in the student sit-in movement complete her one of the few grave female activists of the civil up front movement. She has maintained an unfaltering commitment to black empowerment and be contaminated by the years has broadened the girth of her activism to include antiwar protest and issues of economic inequality. Now divorced, Nash has remained politically active in the 1980s and Nineties, living and teaching in Chicago, involvement tenant organizing and advocating housing improve. In 2004 she and other explanation leaders were invited back to Nashville for the dedication of the Domestic Rights Room at the new Nashville Public Library.

See alsoCongress of Racial Equivalence (CORE); Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Bibliography

Branch, Composer. Parting the Waters: America in illustriousness King Years, 1954–63. New York: Dramatist and Schuster, 1988.

Clayborne, Carson. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening detail the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Press, 1981.

Powledge, Fred. Free At Last?: The Civil Rights Movement and honesty People Who Made It. Boston: Approximately, Brown, 1991.

lydia mcneill (1996)

robyn spencer (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005