Nash, who grew up Catholic, preferred her own phrasing, agapic energy, to the word, nonviolence. Nonviolence is too passive a word, she said. Agapic is the adjectival form of agape, the Greek word for self-sacrificing, universal love of one’s fellow human beings. Such love generates energy — agapic energy — which can focus on social change.

Two principles undergird such energy, serving Nash all her life. First, the notion that people are never your enemy; unjust political and economic systems, racist attitudes, emotional and mental illnesses are. You can love and respect the person while you attack the evil.

Second, oppression always requires the cooperation of the oppressed. When blacks in Montgomery, Ala. decided to stop walking to the back of the buses in 1955, for instance, segregated busing in effect stopped in that city.

The process by which desegregation took place, Nash noted, involved six steps. The first was investigation: gathering information and setting a goal. Next came education: studying, creating genuine, not blind, followers, recruiting well and attracting new people. Negotiation followed: face-to-face conversations and strategies. Demonstrations included marches, sit-ins, and pickets that focused on the issues. Resistance included noncooperation and economic withdrawal such as boycotts, work stoppages, nonpayment of taxes, and parallel institutions — one’s own bus transportation, for instance. The last step was ensuring the issue did not resurface. People needed to make sure history was not rolled back and covered, keeping young people in the dark about such rich moments and movements.

Nash offered other advice to young people: Voting is not enough. The civil rights movement in the 1960s was not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement, but a people’s movement. King was a great man and wonderful spokesman. But young people chided him for not moving fast enough. Study is crucial. People need to read such books as Richard Gregg’s “The Power of Nonviolence.” Trust yourself, she said. Work on the issues you are interested in. Don’t let justice sit and wait, take action. If you just talk and talk about your job and never go in to work, she said, you soon will lose your job. It is the same with facing injustice.

“My contemporaries had you in mind,” Nash said, addressing young people in the audience. “We loved you even though we had not yet met you. We wanted a better society for you to be born into.” Some of her contemporaries, she said, freaked out in the face of police brutality, hoses spraying kids and the prospect of jail. On one occasion, Nash put her arms around someone faltering and said, “We’re doing this for generations unborn.”

“Future generations will depend on you for the same,” she concluded.

When I left Kellogg Center, thousands of people were heading to Breslin Center to see the MSU basketball team play Wisconsin. “Wasn’t that awesome when Draymond Green got as many rebounds as the entire Michigan team?” students bantered.

A hundred of us listening to Diane Nash had heard something more awesome than what takes place on a basketball court. Diane Nash is one of the most courageous women I have ever known. Where love and courage intersect, life matters.

Ron Dorr is a State News guest columnist and professor of rhetoric and humanities, James Madison College. Reach him at dorr@msu.edu.