“ the students took it upon themselves without anybody’s permission.” “If we had left it to elected officials to desegregate, I wonder how long we would have had to wait, and I think truly that we might still be waiting,” said Nash at the 2011 National Youth Summit. No single superhuman guided the movement, she believed: It was an individual’s responsibility to ask what they could do to help, not wait for a leader to come along and do it for them. She referred to her activism as direct action instead of protest, viewing it as the result of many years of strategizing rather than as a reaction to major events. Working closely with such activists as John Lewis, Ella Baker and James Lawson, Nash was among the most outspoken, effective advocates of the civil rights movement. There’s no better example of … ‘ We the People’ than her and the people that she worked with.” “Throughout her life, she’s never said it’s about me,” Christopher Wilson, director of experience design at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), tells Smithsonian magazine. Now, the White House has enshrined Nash’s name in history by awarding her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. in support of Black voting rights, and later turned her attention to housing rights and the anti-war movement. She spearheaded the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March, walking alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
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We just want to know if you can meet us.”įollowing the Freedom Rides, Nash, now 84, organized a series of campaigns against segregation and discrimination, guided by the prevailing philosophy of nonviolence. If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead. That’s exactly why the ride must not be stopped. When Birmingham civil rights leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth asked Nash whether she realized Freedom Riders had almost been killed in the city, she reportedly replied, “Yes. Despite Seigenthaler’s efforts to convince her otherwise, Nash and her colleagues decided to move forward with the protest. The first words out of Kennedy’s mouth: “Who the hell is Diane Nash?”Ī co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and leader of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, 23-year-old Nash was the one guiding the new Freedom Riders on their journey to Birmingham, Alabama. Kennedy learned of their plans, he called his assistant, John Seigenthaler, and implored him to dissuade the ten students from continuing their potentially deadly campaign. Unable to find another bus willing to transport the protesters, organizers abandoned the campaign.ĭays later, a separate set of activists from Nashville, Tennessee, slipped their last wills and testaments into envelopes and prepared to restart the Freedom Rides.
The Freedom Riders narrowly escaped the burning bus, only to find themselves under assault by the waiting horde. Wielding pipes, baseball bats, bricks and other weapons, the crowd slashed the bus’ tires and tossed a firebomb through a broken window. On May 14, 1961, an angry mob attacked the Freedom Riders-a group of civil rights activists who’d spent the past ten days traversing the American South in protest of segregation on buses-as they pulled into a station in Anniston, Alabama.
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