Diane nash biography civil rights movement timeline

Diane Judith Nash born May 15, is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters Nashville ; [ 1 ] the Freedom Riders , who desegregated interstate travel; [ 2 ] co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC ; and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project and working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement.

This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of , which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting. Nash was born in and raised Catholic in a middle-class family in Chicago by her father Leon Nash and her mother Dorothy Bolton Nash.

Her father was a veteran of World War II. Her mother worked as a keypunch operator during the war, leaving Nash in the care of her grandmother, Carrie Bolton, until age seven. Carrie Bolton was a cultured woman, known for her refinement and manners. After the war, Nash's parents' marriage ended.

Diane nash children

Dorothy married again to John Baker, a waiter on the railroad dining cars owned by the Pullman Company. Baker was a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters , one of the most powerful black unions in the nation. As Dorothy no longer worked outside the house, Diane saw less of her grandmother Carrie Bolton.