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player ready...The name Diane Nash may not have the same resonance as those of other key figures in the 1961 Freedom Rides that desegregated interstate bus travel in the Deep South.
But the soft-spoken 72-year-old — with her kind face and elegant demeanor — once was a source of so much frustration for the Kennedy administration that an angry U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy demanded to know: “Who the hell is Diane Nash?”
“I was never one to pick a fight,” she said recently as we sat in a Hyde Park restaurant. “But I also wasn’t the type to back down.”
On Thursday, Nash will join Freedom Riders who are coming to Chicago from across the country for a five-day reunion and conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of a movement that would force the Interstate Commerce Commission to uphold desegregation laws already on the books.
It also would affirm the power of nonviolent resistance in the face of massive brutality.
But the Freedom Riders — who were black, white, college-age and middle-aged — may never have succeeded if Nash, who was just 22 at the time, hadn’t intervened when the Riders were brutally beaten in Alabama on May 14, 1961, and the Rides were called off.
In the fall of 1959, Nash had left the South Side of Chicago to attend Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tenn. She had planned to become an English literature teacher. But when she saw firsthand how blacks were treated in the Jim Crow South, she couldn’t sit through another class on Chaucer, she said.
“If you went to downtown Nashville at lunchtime, you’d see all these black people sitting on the curb eating their food because they couldn’t eat in the restaurants,” Nash said. “My stepfather worked the railroad … on a route between Chicago and New Orleans, and he had told me about segregation. But when I experienced it, it was with outrage. The ‘White Only’ and ‘Colored Only’ signs, even on the restrooms, were such a slap in the face and just humiliating. You felt subhuman.”
Nash decided to participate in the workshops of a local minister who was teaching nonviolent resistance to students from various colleges in Nashville.
The 30 students called themselves the Central Committee and began following the lead of students across the country who, dressed in their Sunday best, staged sit-ins at lunch counters. The group eventually was successful in desegregating lunch counters and restaurants in downtown Nashville.
On Easter weekend in 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed to help coordinate what students nationwide were doing. Nash was among the first students elected as a leader in SNCC, whose task was to serve as a clearinghouse, sharing information from campuses across the country where sit-ins were taking place.
In early 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality sent her a notice for the Nashville movement’s newsletter that said CORE members would leave Washington, D.C., on May 4, on a two-week bus trip to test interstate travel in the Deep South.
CORE’s plan was to deliberately violate Jim Crow laws by having some blacks sit in the front of the bus in the “White Only” section and having some whites sit in the back. Blacks and whites also would be seated next to one another. And when the Freedom Riders reached the bus terminals, they would try to desegregate those as well.
“They gave us the itinerary, and it showed they were coming from Washington, down through the Eastern states and across Alabama and Mississippi and ending up in New Orleans,” she said. “It was clear to me, looking at their route, that they would need help along the way.”
Ten days into the trip, on Mother’s Day, May 14, the Freedom Riders left Atlanta with one group on a Greyhound bus and the other on a Trailways bus.
Klansmen outside Anniston, Ala., set fire to the Greyhound bus and beat some of the Riders. Another group of hoodlums on the Trailways bus savagely beat the Riders on the way to Birmingham. Then a larger mob continued the onslaught as the activists got off the bus in the terminal.
Eventually the decision was made to call off the Rides.
Robert Kennedy sent administrative assistant John Seigenthaler to Alabama to escort the Riders to New Orleans and avert a crisis that had begun to embarrass an administration reluctant to intervene. With the Riders safely in New Orleans, Seigenthaler arrived in his hotel room believing he had saved the day.
“I thought what a great hero I am … mission accomplished,” said Seigenthaler in Stanley Nelson’s documentary “Freedom Riders,” which will air May 16 on PBS’ “American Experience.”
“My phone in the hotel room rings, and it’s the attorney general. He has received word from the FBI in Nashville that another wave of Freedom Riders is coming down to Birmingham from Nashville to continue the Freedom Rides, and he opens the conversation, ‘Who the hell is Diane Nash?'”
When Nash heard that the Riders were calling off the Ride, she had her boyfriend drive her to area colleges including Tennessee State University, Fisk University and Meharry Medical College to track down Central Committee members for an emergency meeting.
“I told them that it was clear to me that if the Rides ended, the message would be sent that all you had to do to end a nonviolent campaign was inflict massive violence,” she said. “Then nothing else would get done. You couldn’t talk about desegregating public accommodations or anything. It felt like it would impact every part of the civil rights movement.”
Central Committee members deliberated for hours and finally came to a consensus that 10 of them immediately would continue the Freedom Rides.
“Several people volunteered to go, and I was going to go, but someone said one of us needed to stay behind to keep the lines of communications open and to accurately interpret what was going on to the press and to the government, and to continue to recruit people to join the Freedom Rides,” Nash said.
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When the Kennedy administration received word that another wave of students was coming, Nash was the contact person.
“They kept saying, ‘You don’t understand. Somebody is going to get killed,'” Nash said. “I told them we were well-aware of the dangers of living in the South. Several students had given me sealed envelopes and told me what to do with them if they never returned.”
Over the next several months, Nash worked tirelessly making sure the Freedom Riders had what they needed. CORE, SNCC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others continued to recruit Riders.
Between May and December 1961, more than 400 protesters risked their lives, some enduring months-long stays in Mississippi’s Parchman State Penitentiary.
Nash married civil rights activist and Freedom Rider James Bevel, and they would live in the South working against segregation until 1965. Then she returned to Chicago, divorced and worked mainly on behalf of tenants’ rights.
“I think people rely too heavily on elected officials to make things happen,” she said. “I’d like people to think about how long it might have taken to get the right to vote, to desegregate public accommodations and interstate travel if we’d waited for an elected official.
“We had to take responsibility for changes ourselves, or we might still be waiting.”
To learn more about the 50th anniversary conference, go to freedomriders50th.com.