Black Women Who Slayed History: Diane Nash
This Black History Month, we’re highlighting the black woman who helped make our world what it is today. Today, we honor Diane Nash.
All you woke college students out there, meet your new idol.
Diane Nash was born in Chicago and like a lot of you young people, she was gorgeous.
Like she entered the Miss Illinois beauty contest and she got runner-up, gorgeous.
And while she could have spent the rest of her life coasting on her good genes, everything changed when Diane transferred to a college in Tennessee.
She saw segregation everywhere.
So she decided to do something about it and became one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known by its acronym SNCC.
While in SNCC, Diana Nash was a leader in the Freedom Rides movement, and in 1962, when she was four months pregnant, she was even sentenced to go to jail for teaching nonviolent protest tactics to children, although luckily she got out on an appeal.
From there, she continued to fight for civil rights — she was active in pushing for voting rights in Selma and de-segregation in Birmingham — before she retired to Chicago to work in education and try and remind people that even though the Civil Rights movement had Martin Luther King Jr. for a leader, it was fundamentally a people’s movement.
Its success can be re-replicated.
You just have to be willing to work for it.
For more on Diane Nash, click here.
And for more black women who slayed history read:
Black Women Who Slayed History: Shirley Chisholm
Black Women Who Slayed History: Ida B. Wells
