Diane Nash

Diane Judith Nash grew up in a middle-class Catholic family on Chicago's South Side. When she arrived at Fisk University in Nashville in 1959, she encountered Jim Crow segregation for the first time — and it radicalized her. Within months, she became a leader of the Nashville student movement.

At just 22, Nash led the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins that successfully desegregated the city's downtown stores — one of the first major victories of the civil rights movement. When the original Freedom Riders were attacked and hospitalized in Alabama, Nash organized students to continue the rides, telling the Justice Department: "We can't let violence overcome nonviolence."

She was a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key strategist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. President Kennedy appointed her to a committee that helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She was jailed repeatedly, including while pregnant. John Lewis called her "the most courageous person in the civil rights movement."