A young protester’s life-altering decision

A young protester's life-altering decision
SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE
SUNDAY PUNCH

"The Children" (Random House, 1998) is David Halberstam's story of the college students who came together in Nashville, Tenn., in the Rev. James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence in the 1960s. They took part in the first sit-ins at the city's lunch rooms. And later, as Freedom Riders, they helped carry the struggle to end segregation into the deep South.

The following excerpt comes from the book's opening pages. Halberstam focuses on 21-year-old Diane Nash, a Chicagoan attending Fisk University.

Nash's outrage at restrooms marked "White Only" and "Colored" she first encountered at the Tennessee State Fair kindled her passionate desire for change and led her to try Lawson's workshops in nonviolence as a means to achieve it. Her peers soon singled her out as a leader.

The introductory chapter's first and last paragraphs quoted below describe Nash's personal struggle to turn her commitment to nonviolence into more than an idea, into an empowering strategic practice and a testament to her identity in the very face of violence.

Halberstam writes that Nash felt deeply afraid on Feb. 20, when she was acting as a control person for that day's protest, her job similar to "the communications men in war, the eyes and ears of the headquarters." But by then, white marauders knew who she was and shouted, " 'She's the one to get!' "

Her moral and spiritual crisis that day became a turning point in Nash's life.

Years later though she could recall almost every physical detail of what it had been like to sit there in that course on English literature, Diane Nash could remember nothing of what Professor Robert Hayden had said. What she remembered instead was her fear. A large clock on the wall had clicked slowly and loudly; each minute which was subtracted put her nearer to harm's way. What she remembered about the class in the end was her inability to concentrate, and the fact that both her hands were soaked with sweat by the end of the class and left the clear handprint of fear on the wooden desk. It was always the last class that she attended on the days that she and her colleagues assembled before they went downtown and challenged the age-old segregation laws at the lunch counters in Nashville's downtown shopping center. No matter how much she steeled herself, no matter how much she believed in what they were doing, the anticipatory fear never left her. ...

... She knew she had to make a decision and make it quickly. If she failed here, she would have to leave the Movement. She sat down for a time (on a downtown corner when her panic became overwhelming), and gradually her ability to breathe came back. She thought about how important the sit-ins had become to her; she realized that this was the most important thing she had ever done, and perhaps more valuable than anything she might ever do again. Overnight, because of the sit-ins, she had felt of value to herself. Therefore she had to go forward -- she owed it not just to the others but, in a way she had never felt before, to herself. She would be extremely careful in every decision she made -- there would be no recklessness. But she would not turn back. If something terrible was going to happen to her, she decided, let it happen when she was doing something she believed in. She got up and walked back to her job.