Taking it in: Diane Nash at the Downtown Nashville plaza dedicated to her. (Photo: John Partipilo)
Diane Nash, an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, was honored Saturday in Nashville with the dedication of a public plaza and a gala at Meharry Medical College.
Nash, a Chicago native, was a 22-year-old student at Nashville’s historically Black Fisk University in 1960 when she began attending workshops on nonviolent civil disobedience by Rev. James Lawson, who had studied with Mahatma Gandhi. She subsequently played a key role in the sit-ins and at the climax of a march to city hall, confronted Mayor Ben West to ask him if he felt discrimination against people of color was wrong. His admission that he did began the process of desegregating the city’s lunch counters.
She went on to coordinate Freedom Rides in 1961 to challenge enforcement of two U.S. Supreme Court cases that ruled segregation on public buses was unconstitutional.
Described by writer David Halberstam in “The Children” as “fearless and selfless,” Nash, now 85, was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She and then-husband James Bevel organized the voting rights protests in Alabama that culminated with “Bloody Sunday,” during which marchers to Montgomery, Alabama, were beaten and attacked with tear gas by state and local law enforcement officers.