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 in the African American civil rights movement of the 1960s in Florida.

Life

She grew up in Miami and Belle Glade, where she also attended high school. Your actions against the U.S. racial segregation began at the age of 13 years along with her ​​two- year-old sister when she in a branch of fast food chain Dairy Queen in South Florida the sign "Colored Only" ( "For Colored " ) ignored and regularly hired at the snake for "White ". Her sister later told that they were always served and never got problems, which had only changed when they reported friends and acquaintances of them and told them that they could do it as well.

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

Widely attention was an action on 20 February 1960. Together with her sister and a few other students of FAMU Due protested against segregation at the food counter counter of a Woolworth store near the university campus. With a sit-in, they blocked with " Whites Only" ( " For Whites Only " ) counter marked until they were arrested by the police. First left again at liberty, they held a few days later a demonstration of many students, who was stopped by police using tear gas. Due was hit by a tear gas grenade and suffered an injury that led to a permanent damage to their eyes. She suffered since with increased sensitivity to light and life had to wear dark sunglasses. In the court case because of the sit-down strikes them and the other participants was sentenced to fines of 300 U.S. $. In continuation of the protest refused several of those convicted to pay the penalty because they recognized also in an acceptance of racial segregation, and preferred, alternatively serve out 49 days in jail. The action was later named the first " Jail -in" in the United States. Country wide, the media reported and supporters were in favor of their protest, including James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte and Eleanor Roosevelt. Martin Luther King sent them a telegram sent to prison in order to express his solidarity.

Dues parents worried about their safety and asked them to focus on their education. She tried both to bring into balance, but was excluded in the result of their protests by FAMU. She was only in 1965 allowed to enroll again and to graduate.

She led in Florida by more demonstration, protest marches, boycotts and voter registration campaigns of the black civil rights movement of the 1960s. The voter registration project of CORE in North Florida, for the due in 1964, worked as a field secretary, led to more registrations of African Americans than any other in the southern United States. In other protests that time due was repeatedly arrested by the police.

She was married to John D. Due Jr. since 1963, one also against racial segregation dedicated law student and later civil rights lawyer. With him she had three children, one of her daughters is the writer Tananarive Due.

The co-authored with her ​​daughter's book Freedom in the Family 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 FAMU and Florida Freedom Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 2006, FAMU, which they had once ruled repeatedly, the honorary doctorates. In the same year the television History Channel portrayed them in a broadcast of the award- winning series, Voices of Civil Rights. In 2011 she underwent a ceremony by the Mayor of Tallahassee, who declared 11 May 2011 to 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 978-0345447333.