Patricia Stephens Due

Patricia Stephens Due

Patricia Stephens Due (born December 9, 1939 in Quincy , Florida , † February 7, 2012 in Smyrna , Georgia ) was an American civil rights activist . She was one of the leading figures of the African American civil rights movement in Florida in the 1960s.

Life

She grew up in Miami and Belle Glade , where she also attended high school. Their actions against the US racial segregation she started at the age of 13 years along with her two-year-old sister when she in a branch of the fast food chain Dairy Queen in South Florida, the "Shield Colored Only " ( "For Colored ") ignored and regularly queued in line for "whites". Her sister later said that they were always served and never had problems, which only changed when they told friends and acquaintances about it and told them that they could do the same.

In the fall of 1957, Due began her studies at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee . During a visit to Miami in 1959, she took part in a workshop of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on non-violent forms of protest and learned about forms of action such as sit-ins . In 1960 she co-founded the Tallahassee section of CORE with others.

An action on February 20, 1960 attracted widespread attention. Together with her sister and a few other FAMU students, Due protested against racial segregation at the food counter of a Woolworth branch near the university campus. With a sit-in, they blocked the counter labeled “ Whites-Only ” until they were arrested by the police. Initially released, a few days later they staged a march of numerous students, which was stopped by the police using tear gas . Due was hit by a tear gas grenade and sustained an injury that permanently damaged her eyes. Since then she has suffered from increased sensitivity to light and had to wear dark sunglasses all her life. In the sit-in lawsuit, she and the other participants were fined US $ 300 each. In the continuation of the protest, several of the convicts refused to pay the fine because they saw it as an acceptance of racial segregation and preferred to serve 49 days in prison as an alternative. The action was later called the first "jail-in" in the US. The media reported across the country and supporters spoke out in favor of their protest, including James Baldwin , Harry Belafonte and Eleanor Roosevelt . Martin Luther King sent them a telegram to prison to show his solidarity.

Due's parents were concerned about her safety and asked her to focus on her education. She tried to balance the two, but was expelled from the FAMU as a result of her protests. She was not allowed to re-enroll and graduate until 1965.

She led other demonstrations, marches, boycotts and voter registration campaigns by the black civil rights movement of the 1960s in Florida. CORE's North Florida voter registration project, for which Due was field secretary in 1964, resulted in more African American registrations than any other in the southern United States. During other protests at the time, Due was arrested several times by the police.

She had been married to John D. Due Jr., also an anti-segregation law student and later civil rights attorney, since 1963. She had three children with him, one of her daughters is the writer Tananarive Due .

The book Freedom in the Family , co-authored with her daughter, won the 2003 Written History Award from the Southeast Regional African-American Heritage Preservation Alliance. Due also received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Outstanding Leadership , the Gandhi Award for Outstanding Work in Human Relations from FAMU, and the Florida Freedom Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . In 2006 the FAMU, which had once excluded it several times, awarded it an honorary doctorate . In the same year, the television station History Channel portrayed her in a broadcast of the award-winning series Voices of Civil Rights . In 2011 she was honored by the mayor of Tallahassee, who declared May 11, 2011 Patricia Stephens Due Day .

Works

• Freedom in the Family - A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (together with Tananarive Due), Ballantine Books, New York 2003. ISBN 978-0-345-44733-3

Web links

• Patricia Stephens Due at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida , Department of History
• Passing the Torch, Assessing the Toll: The FAMU Jail-In 50 Years Later , by Tananarive Due in The Defenders Online

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Patricia Stephens Due Biography at The HistoryMakers. Retrieved February 8, 2012.