Nash, Diane Judith, 1938-

Diane Judith Nash (born May 15, 1938) is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement.

Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters (Nashville);[1] the Freedom Riders, who desegregated interstate travel;[2] co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project and working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting.

In July 2022, Nash was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden.[3]

Biography
Early life
Nash was born in 1938 and raised Catholic in a middle-class family in Chicago by her father Leon Nash and her mother Dorothy Bolton Nash. After graduating from Hyde Park High School in Chicago, Nash went to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard University, a historically black college (HBCU). After a year, she transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in English. Though protests would continue in Nashville and across the South, Nash and three other students were first successfully served at the Post House Restaurant on March 17, 1960.[11] Students continued the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters for months, accepting arrest in line with nonviolent principles. Nash, with John Lewis, led the protesters in a policy of refusing to pay bail. In February 1961, Nash served jail time in solidarity with the "Rock Hill Nine"[12] — nine students imprisoned after a lunch counter sit-in. Together with SCLC, Nash and Bevel eventually implemented the Selma to Montgomery marches, a series of protests for voting rights in Alabama in early 1965. They were initiated and organized by James Bevel, who was running SCLC's Selma Voting Rights Movement.[28] Marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge on their way to the state capital of Montgomery, but after they left the city limits, they were attacked by county police and Alabama state troopers armed with clubs and tear gas, determined to break up the peaceful march.