For decades, it seems, Diane Nash has been asked about women’s role in the civil rights movement: what it was, why it hasn’t been more widely acknowledged, if she can describe her fellow organizers’ contributions.

Ms. Nash, now 79, led students in sit-ins and helped coordinate the historic 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. She has been portrayed in the film “Selma.”

But when asked again recently by The New York Times about women’s contributions, she joked that the list was “brief.”