Marguerite V. Nash was a woman of many dimensions. She met a president, led the NAACP and served as a jail matron, the first African-American woman to hold that position at the Summit County jail.
The president was John F. Kennedy. The year was 1963, when tensions were high in the Civil Rights movement. The place was the White House. Nash was one of 300 invited women who heard Kennedy plea for their cooperation in easing the nation’s racial problems. The group also met with the soon-to-be-president Lyndon B. Johnson. Nash told theBeacon Journal that she thought it “was a very useful meeting.” Johnson reported that he thought that meeting might be the most effective in the series Kennedy had on Civil Rights.
Nash had been invited because of her involvement in the local and state NAACP. A long-time member and activist of the Akron chapter, she also was involved in the state organization, serving on the executive board in the 1950s and early 1960s.
But she had another life as well. Her job, her career was with the Summit County Sheriff’s Department. She joined the sheriff’s department in 1960. In 1975 she was named Summit County’s jail matron as “an affirmative action to ensure the equal rights of minorities and women in our office,” Sheriff Ronald Weyrandt told the Beacon Journal.At the time of her retirement in 1981, one of her colleagues, Sgt. Ken Lockhard, said, “She is really a mother to us.”
Born in Youngstown, she was the widow of the one-time Negro All-American basketball and football player James R. Nash. They had three daughters and one son. Nash was a member of the Wesley Temple A.M.E. Church. In 1987, the local NAACP chapter created a scholarship in her name.
Nash died on Aug. 6, 1996 at the Cypress Nursing Home in Houston.
Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.
–Kathleen L. Endres