During the 1950s, all African Americans experienced discrimination in one form or another. Growing up in Chicago, Diane Nash was familiar with the segregated neighborhoods and schools that resulted from discriminatory practices. This was de facto segregation, or segregation "in fact," which meant that segregation had “just happened” and was not required by law. At the same time, the culture in Chicago was tolerant enough to allow Nash to win beauty pageants in which Caucasian girls also competed without incident.

When Nash traveled south for college, first at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University for a year and then at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, she discovered the added indignities of de jure segregation, in which state and local laws required African Americans to use separate public facilities. Her shock upon being denied service because of her race led her to seek an effective response. Nash attended weekly seminars in nonviolent direct action led by James Lawson, an African American pacifist and conscientious objector who was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In these sessions, Nash found a philosophy and a strategy that would allow her to fight back.

Nash quickly emerged as the most poised and articulate of the student protesters who conducted sit-ins at downtown Nashville lunch counters in February 1960. She famously confronted Mayor Ben West as he was speaking to a crowd of civil rights supporters and got him to concede that he felt discrimination was wrong. This was a major early victory for the students.

Later in 1960, Nash and other African American student leaders on campuses throughout the South created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an independent student organization that initially focused on voter registration and nonviolent direct action. After leaving school to direct SNCC's nonviolent efforts, Nash became the coordinator of the second wave of Freedom Riders, recruiting black and white students from around the United States to continue the work of the initial protesters who had been hospitalized or jailed. Determined to serve her jail sentences rather than pay fines when arrested for her efforts, Nash was imprisoned on one of the Freedom Rides. Three years later, even though she was five months pregnant, she would serve another brief jail sentence for teaching nonviolent direct action to students in Mississippi.

After 1965, Nash withdrew from any official role in the Civil Rights Movement. SNCC had become more militant, and Nash had encountered sexism there and in other civil rights organizations. She returned to Chicago, where she began teaching in the public schools. In subsequent decades, she has devoted her energies to housing and welfare issues.

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