Diane Nash, Forgotten Civil Rights Hero
Largely forgotten today, Diane Nash, a former beauty queen with the delicate features of a porcelain doll, was arguably the most daring young civil rights leader in the United States in the 1960s. At the age of 21, she was the head of the student movement that desegregated lunch counters in Nashville. A year later, while still in college, she assumed command of the Freedom Rides, the highly dangerous bus trips taken by civil rights workers through the Deep South.
By all rights, Diane, whom I write about in Freedom’s Daughters, should have been elected the first head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the national student organization that played such a huge role in the later movement. But she was passed over in favor of a male colleague. The reason was sexism, said John Lewis, another young civil rights leader: “There was a desire to emphasize and showcase black manhood.”
Although Diane Nash unquestionably deserves a place in the civil rights pantheon next to male icons like John Lewis and Martin Luther King, she, like so many other women activists, has disappeared into the cracks of history.
