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Diane Nash: Leader in the Student Wing of the Civil Rights Movement

by A. Ward

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Diane Nash: Leader in the Student Wing of the Civil Rights Movement
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Early Life
Diane Judith Nash was born on May 15th, 1938 in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised in a middle-class catholic area. With both of her parents involved in the war effort, Nash’s grandmother Carrie Bolton was her main caretaker. Bolton would become a very important influence on Nash, as she was committed to making sure her granddaughter understood her worth and value, though they did not talk much of race or racial prejudice. Bolton believed that racial prejudice was taught to younger generations by their elders, and wanted to protect young Diane Nash. This sheltered her though, and the consequences of Bolton’s actions were felt when Nash enrolled in college.
Involvement in SNCC
Nash attended college at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee and it was there that she first encountered the Jim Crow System. The severe racial segregation that she felt prompted her to attend non-violence workshops put on by James Lawson. She got involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and started going to protests.

Nash’s first protests with the SNCC were the sit-ins in local department stores. In 1960, Nash was designated as the student sit-in movement in Nashville, and the wave of lunch-counter sit-ins started in North Carolina became a big part of Diane Nash’s beginnings. February of 1961, Nash participated in a sit-in and was arrested with a few of her peers. The group implemented the ‘jail-no-bail’ tactics, and remained in jail for the extent of their sentence. The SNCC’s work in Nashville made it the first city in the south to desegregate those spaces.
Freedom Riders
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