As chairperson of the Nashville sit-in group, Nash was a special target of potential violence. She had to conquer her fear to lead.
Diane Nash, a Chicago native, first became actively involved with the Civil Rights Movement in 1959, when she enrolled in Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and came face to face with the pervasive segregation of the Jim Crow South for the first time in her life. Nash's early efforts included orchestrating the first successful civil rights campaign to de-segregate lunch counters, as well as helping to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group that became one of the most influential during the Civil Rights Movement. Nash is widely recognized for her leadership in the Freedom Rides, a campaign to desegregate interstate travel. Nash played a key role in bringing Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to Montgomery, Alabama on May 21, 1961, in support of the Freedom Riders. Nash later played a major role in the Birmingham de-segregation campaign of 1963, and the Selma Voting Rights Campaign of 1965. In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King awarded Nash and her husband, James Bevel, SCLC's Rosa Parks Award for their work. Nash remained active throughout the Civil Rights Movement, and later in the Vietnam peace movement.
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