Agapic Energy
Raised in Chicago with a doting grandmother, Diane Nash had little experience with blatant racism as a girl. She would long remember the first time she was turned away for being African American as a teen. At 15, she placed a phone call to a modeling school. In her introduction, she hadn’t thought to tell the man on the other line that she was black. He posed the question – and when she answered, he told her the school didn’t have the facilities for Negro students.
It wasn’t until she attended a university in Tennessee in 1959 that she saw the daily, overt racism that her classmates and their families endured and what her grandmother must have lived through decades earlier when she was a maid for a white family in Memphis. In Illinois, municipal housing code had restricted where black people could live until 1948. In Tennessee, a state that had enacted 20 Jim Crow laws by 1955, Diane and other students of the same race saw restrictions and segregation all around them.
Attractive and amiable, she looked the part of an unassuming one-time charm school candidate. But the demure exterior outlined in black-and-white photos cloaked composed defiance. Soon after her arrival, she found her way to nonviolence workshops by Vanderbilt divinity school student Rev. James Lawson who, like Dr. King, had studied Gandhi’s principles and orchestrated role-playing demonstrations to prepare students for effective protests. She became a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Nashville and proved again and again her willingness to press issues, no matter how far she had to go or who she needed to confront. In pearls and a cardigan, she would lead marches of young men and women to sit-ins to demonstrate their opposition to being forced away from white shoppers to eat.
And it wasn’t just talking, marching, or sitting that made her one of the best remembered women to emerge as leaders in the male-dominated Civil Rights Movement. She was willing to risk everything and face danger with the same peaceful but action-taking insistence on what was right.
In one of the most shared images of Diane – her eating with three others at a Greyhound Bus station lunch counter, which was among the first to desegregate – the illusion is one of relative unease but not visible turbulence. In the shot snapped for “The Nashville Banner,” Diane is peering behind her shoulder, as if to watch for what might be coming. Moments later, she would say, a middle-aged waitress came storming from the kitchen brandishing a long knife to drive the photographer out of the restaurant, and then white thugs attacked the two men pictured. This was dangerous work. In 1960, she was jailed for her participation in the sit-ins, but that didn’t stop her, either. She didn’t waver.
After more than 3,000 people marched from Tennessee A&I State University to the courthouse where Mayor Ben West was waiting, Diane Nash stepped forward and asked whether he recommended that department store lunch counters be desegregated. He agreed, and the local newspaper spread the message across town the following morning. Weeks later, Nashville became the first major city to begin desegregating public facilities with six downtown stores opening their lunch counters, finally, to African Americans.
That wasn’t enough, though. This was bigger than a handful of stores. The Nashville Student Protest Movement to desegregate all public facilities continued for another four years. And Nash would spend the next decades of her life continuously fighting for what she believed was right, whether that meant denouncing southern, or northern, racism or rallying to save villagers in the Vietnam War. The goals shifted over the years, but her response did not.
What was her focus, her answer to perhaps the most perplexing and harrowing questions of our country’s history? A non-violent and compassionate – but direct – approach.
Fifty years later, speaking to a university crowd, she would give the driving force behind the Civil Rights Movement a name beyond nonviolence: “Agapic energy.” It was a term she drew from one of the Greek words for love, agape, which denotes love for humankind. When she spoke about the tactics for the movement, she told the packed room at Notre Dame Law School that the first rule was always this: “People are never your enemy.” Like Dr. King and other like-minded leaders, Nash saw the wisdom in un-labeling, instead searching for ways to dissolve identity barriers. She was able to turn enemies into allies by focusing on respecting them while opposing their ideas or actions. She held onto that answer with unmoving focus, with conviction, and so she provided a sense of purpose – a better way - to those who chose to follow her, even on the most perilous paths.
Two years after she confidently pressed for a public answer from Nashville’s mayor, one of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s top advisors, John Seigenthaler Sr., questioned and pressured Diane, by then an organizer for the Freedom Riders. Seigenthaler, according to his account, told her she must stop Freedom Riders in their journey from Washington D.C., through the illegally still-segregated bus routes, to New Orleans. You can almost hear the quiet calm and clarity in her response to stop the activists: “They are not going to turn back.”
She didn’t argue or make threats – and she didn’t apologize, either. This is how Seigenthaler remembered her reaction:
You know that spiritual, “Like a tree standing by the water, I will not be moved”? She would not be moved. And I felt my voice go up another decibel and another, and soon I was shouting, “Young woman, do you understand what you’re doing? You’re going to get somebody — do you understand you’re going to get somebody killed?” And there’s a pause, and she said, “Sir, you should know, we all signed our last wills and testaments last night, before they left. We know someone will be killed.”
United in focused purpose, the riders were willing to take the risk. No one was killed – though they were injured during mob violence and the Ku Klux Klan firebombed their bus as it was leaving Anniston, Alabama. And Diane suffered, too, in the aftermath. At six months pregnant with her first child, she elected not to fight a possible prison sentence of more than two years for influencing students to participate in the rides. Why? It would have diminished what she stood for. Her thoughts, expressed in an open letter, showed she never let go of the end goal. "I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free — not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives." The judge in the case sentenced her to 10 days in a cockroach-ridden jail in Jackson, Mississippi.
Her persistence paid off, though she never saw it as a single battle. Two years later, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to a national committee to promote the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And she played an important role in the Selma right-to-vote movement, which culminated with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She joined the peace movement to stop the Vietnam War and devoted her life to teaching Gandhi-like nonviolent strategies. She stood for something bigger than any one person and she never backed down.