Diane Nash was on front line of Civil Rights Movement

Diane Nash was on front line of Civil Rights Movement

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/oct/28/nash-on-front-line-of-rights-movement/

 

Memphis Commercial Appeal - Memphis, TN, USA

 

Freedom Awards ceremony lauds three

 

By Michael Lollar - +1 529-2793 - October 28, 2008

 

Diane Nash was one of the rare female leaders in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s but the least known winner of this year's Freedom Awards from the National Civil Rights Museum.

 

Nash, 70, of Chicago was living in Nashville in 1960 as a student at Fisk University. As a child, she had dreamed of being a nun. As an adult, her dreams turned to nonviolent civil disobedience.

 

Offended by prejudice in the South, Nash attended disobedience workshops and became a leader of Nashville's lunch counter sit-ins.

 

"I think there is no greater invention of the 20th century than Mohandas Gandhi's invention of a way of making social change without killing and maiming each other," Nash said this week. She was preparing to accept the National Freedom Award in a ceremony today honoring her along with former vice president Al Gore and blues legend B.B. King.

 

National Civil Rights Museum chairman Benjamin Hooks said Nash became the "leader of the movement in Nashville. She was on the front line." She would help found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, take an active part in freedom rides from Birmingham to Jackson, Miss., and join the staff of of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

 

One of King's key assistants, Rev. C.T. Vivian of Atlanta, said Nash was the most important student leader in the movement. "Martin King said that in Nashville we had the best nonviolent movement in the nation." He describes Nash as "very calm, very thoughtful. She always knew what she was doing. She was more like a strategist."

 

Part of the strategy was to refuse to post bail when she was repeatedly arrested. She used jailings as forums focusing on the inherent injustice of discriminating solely on the basis of race. In a highly publicized encounter with Nashville's mayor, she asked if such a policy was wrong. When he agreed, Nashville's lunch counters began serving black customers.

 

Nash said that although her focus was nonviolent, she was considered a "militant. This was something new. We ended up doing more than anything we could ever have hoped to accomplish."

 

After her role in the sit-ins, Nash helped found SNCC. She was appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1964 to a committee that helped pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She worked with King from 1961 to 1965 as an organizer, strategist, staff member and instructor with the SCLC.

 

Museum president Beverly Robertson said Nash was "a unique commodity. Women usually were the wives of leaders -- like Coretta King or Myrlie Evers. Diane Nash was a lead person, out front."

 

Gore will receive the museum's International Freedom Award for his role as a social activist, including promoting solutions to global warming. Robertson said B.B. King's Lifetime Achievement Award includes his role in forming a foundation to improve prison conditions. "More recently his museum opened in Indianola, Miss. It is a testament to this whole genre of music (the blues) and its role as part of the struggle. People sang the blues because they were blue. It gave them something to stomp their feet and clap their hands about."

 

Awards schedule

The Freedom Awards will be presented today at a free public ceremony at 10 a.m. at Temple of Deliverance Church of God in Christ, 369 G.E. Patterson, followed by a $200 per person awards banquet at 6:30 p.m. at Memphis Cook Convention Center.

 

© 2008 GandhiServe Foundation

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs