Biography
Diane Nash was the central organizer of the Nashville sit-in movement, a co-founder of SNCC, and the strategist who refused to allow the Freedom Rides to be halted after the firebombing of the Anniston bus and the violence in Birmingham in May 1961 — recruiting Nashville student volunteers to continue the rides into Mississippi. She and the rest of that group were arrested in Jackson on May 24, 1961 and served 39 days at Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary. In April 1962, two months pregnant, she chose not to appeal a sentence for 'contributing to the delinquency of minors' (for organizing high school students into the freedom movement) and was prepared to give birth in jail rather than appeal her conviction. She was a principal organizer of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery campaign. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022.
The May 14, 1962 Militant distinguishes Nash’s two-year delinquency-of-minors sentence from her April 30 courtroom-contempt confinement. When she came to surrender and abandon the appeal, Judge Russell B. Moore imposed ten days for refusing to leave segregated seating, and deferred the underlying case. The report therefore does not establish that she began serving two years that day.
