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Not only did she play a major role in the Freedom rides but she also played a pivotal role in the desegregation of Nashville lunch counters. Here's a tribute I wrote for her and for Mayor Ben West, who Diane convinced to support integration:
"Ben West was the Mayor of Nashville in 1960, when Black college students began a series of lunch-counter sit-ins in segregated department stores that were among the many pillars of the Jim Crow South. For months, those students had been arrested and hauled off to jail. As a result, the Black community had boycotted Nashville stores and Whites had also stayed away, crippling the downtown Nashville economy. Tensions had risen to the point where the home and church of Reverend Alexander Looby, a civil rights leader, had been bombed, sending him to the hospital.
"Responding to that violence, thousands of Nashvillians marched to City Hall where Mayor West met them. One young Fisk student, Diane Nash, spoke quietly that day to Mayor West and pleaded with him to use the prestige of his office to end racial segregation at the lunch-counters. Mayor West's response was simple and direct: "Yes, young lady, I will do that."
"Years later, Ben West said that, at that moment, he had said the only thing that any moral person could say – that he had answered as a God-fearing man, and not as a politician. The next day, the Nashville Banner's headline said it all "INTEGRATE COUNTERS – MAYOR". Within a month, all Nashville lunch-counters were integrated and, with that positive role-model in the heart of the South, Jim Crow's racist days were numbered."
I would dearly love to meet Ms. Nash myself. She is an inspiration and a much-needed role model these days as our franchise undergoes another round of attacks from the farces of evil known as the Republican party.
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