Diane was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago, Illinois by her parents Leon and Dorothy Nash. After she finished high school in Chicago, she went to attend Howard University in Washington, DC. After one year, she transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. While Diane was living in Nashville, she was exposed to the Jim Crow Laws and their effects on the lives of Black people for the first time. The unfair treatment angered her and made her heart wrench, so Diane decided to join the civil rights movement, and this moved her to start several campaigns. Some of her campaigns included the integration of lunch counters in Nashville, the Freedom Riders, and the desegregation of interstate travel. She helped facilitate several voting rights initiatives, including the Alabama Voting Rights Project and the Selma Voting Rights Movement—both of which helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in congress.
“Freedom, by definition, is people realizing that they are their own leaders.”
—Diane Nash
This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Girls by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.
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