FOUR FREEDOM RIDERS

Diane Nash, 22, has earned combat stripes in the Negro protest movement: two arrests for taking part in sit-ins. Born on Chicago's South Side, she studied at Washington's Howard University between secretarial jobs, transferred to Fisk University in Nashville in 1959 ("I wanted to come South to see what it was really like"). There she spent more time working toward integration than for her degree, last February she dropped out of school to serve as fulltime coordinating secretary of the well-planned, successful Nashville student sit-in movement (TIME, May 23, 1960), joined the Freedom Riders (along with 22 Nashville students) in Montgomery. A Catholic and light enough in color to pass for white, Diane has talked of some day teaching English in Southern schools, but adds: "I'll probably be involved with this thing for the rest of my life."

The Rev. James Morris Lawson Jr., 32, advocates the Gandhi-given tactics of nonviolent protest as a way of life for U.S. Negroes. Lawson does as he teaches. Born in Pennsylvania, he spent most of a year in a federal penitentiary as a conscientious objector, studied with Gandhi during his three years as a student missionary in India. Last June, over the protests of 112 members of the Vanderbilt faculty, Lawson was expelled from the university's divinity school (TIME, June 13, 1960) for advocating civil disobedience to fellow students who took part in Nashville's sit-in campaigns. Lawson went on to get his degree from Boston University, now is pastor of the Scott Chapel Methodist Church in Shelbyville, Tenn. Between religious services, he teaches workshops in "nonviolent action" and acts as vice president of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference.

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., 36, last week became the first white Northerner to organize his own Freedom Ride. Brash, athletic Presbyterian Minister Bill Coffin, chaplain of Yale University, has never lacked for privileges of his own (his father was vice president of Manhattan's high-priced home furnishings store, W. & J. Sloane). He is married to the actress daughter of Pianist Artur Rubinstein. Coffin majored in government at Yale, served as a liaison officer with French and Russian troops during World War II, later worked as a Russian expert for the Central Intelligence Agency after studying divinity at Union Theological Seminary, where his uncle, Henry Sloane Coffin, was a longtime president. Coffin made it clear that his Southern journey had nothing, officially, to do with Yale. "My president," he said, "doesn't even know I'm down here."

James Leonard Farmer, 41, helped found the Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago 19 years ago; four months ago he was elected CORE's national director. Son of a college professor and grandson of a slave, hefty (6 ft., 210 Ibs.) James Farmer studied medicine at Texas' Wiley College just long enough to realize that he could not stand the sight of blood, decided to become a minister, took his divinity degree at Howard University, but was never ordained. Instead, he went to work for such "social-action causes" as Fellowship of Reconciliation and the N.A.A.C.P. He studied the life of Gandhi, began applying the techniques of nonviolent protest to the situation of U.S.mNegroes. Farmer planned and directed the first busload of Freedom Riders. Married to a white girl, he idealistically aims for more than an end to legal barriers against Negroes: "We want a society of friends."

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