Love Is Loud
How Diane Nash Led the Civil Rights Movement
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Four starred reviews!
Meet Diane Nash, a civil rights leader who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, in this “poignant and powerful” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) nonfiction picture book that is “a stunning, little-known story, and a welcome volume” (School Library Journal, starred review) that “highlights major moments in Nash’s life” (The Horn Book, starred review).
Diane grew up in the southside of Chicago in the 1940s. As a university student, she visited the Tennessee State Fair in 1959. Shocked to see a bathroom sign that read For Colored Women, Diane learned that segregation in the South went beyond schools—it was part of daily life. She decided to fight back, not with anger or violence, but with strong words of truth and action.
Finding a group of like-minded students, including student preacher John Lewis, Diane took command of the Nashville Movement. They sat at the lunch counters where only white people were allowed and got arrested, day after day. Leading thousands of marchers to the courthouse, Diane convinced the mayor to integrate lunch counters. Then, she took on the Freedom Rides to integrate bus travel, garnering support from Martin Luther King Jr. and then the president himself—John F. Kennedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Born in Chicago, civil rights activist Diane Nash (b. 1938) grows up in a diverse, integrated community until moving to Tennessee for college, where she first encounters segregation: "Two signs for bathrooms: WHITE and COLORED." Determined to "change wrong into right" through peaceful protest, Nash demonstrates against the ban on integrated seating at lunch counters, confronts Nashville's mayor, and participates in freedom rides, all along showing that "Love is fierce./ Love is strong./ Love is loud!" Wallace's emotive second-person text condenses Nash's extensive activism into an inspiring meditation on love as the heart of justice, while Collier's watercolor and collage illustrations bring artful dimension to Nash's nonviolent resistance. Back matter includes creators' notes and suggested reading material. Ages 4–8.
