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Friday, April 16, 2021
‘The Struggle Continues.’ A new generation pays homage to 1960s activist Patricia Stephens Due. (WaPo)
Khalil Gibran wrote, "Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being."
Heroic civil rights lawyer John D. Due, Jr. and his daughter, Johnita, spoke here at the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center here in St. Augustine, Florida, August 10, 2018.
I was honored to meet Mr. Due and his daughter Johnita, Assistant general Counsel at CNN, and to visit with them.
Here's Mr. Due's and his daughter Tananarive Due's moving tribute to the late Patricia Stephens Due, Mr. Due's life and Ms. Due's mother, from The Washington Post:
‘The Struggle Continues.’ A new generation pays homage to 1960s activist Patricia Stephens Due.
It’s an iconic image that even the woman featured in it never saw before her death. But recently her image was used in Florida and Georgia as a call to action to combat the assault on voting rights. It is the visible determination, grit and refusal to relent in the face of injustice on the woman’s face that both Stacey Abrams of Georgia and the Dream Defenders in Florida recognized could reignite a movement. And the woman in the image is my late wife, Patricia Stephens Due.
I saw that look on her face every day of her life and even as she was dying. That look drew me and hundreds of other students to become part of the Freedom Movement in 1960.
I know that Patricia was not aware of the image because she didn’t include it in her book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir about the Fight for Civil Rights(co-authored with our daughter, Tananarive Due). She had scoured her personal records and the Florida State Archives for images to memorialize the past so we would not forget it. She understood the power of images.
It wasn’t until my 80th birthday, two years after she died in 2012, that our family saw the newly discovered image. Before that, the common image used of my wife in articles was one of her in front of the Tallahassee Theater leading a peaceful, nonviolent demonstration. The irony is not lost on me that the movie showing was “The Day Mars Invaded the Earth.” My head is visible above the hat of one of the police officers.
She had a look of determination on her face there as well. But what makes this recently discovered image different from the one in front of the segregated movie theater is that she is being forcibly arrested, for returning and not relenting. Patricia always practiced nonviolent tactics, but the look on her face made it clear that nobody could mess with her human rights and get away with it.
She had returned to demonstrate for a seat in a movie theater — to me it is so obvious why the bus boycotts, the theater demonstrations, the lunch counter sit-ins were so successful. We were basically demanding the right to pay money to White businesses. But it was more than that; we were demanding the right to be treated with human dignity and as full citizens. That’s why our voting rights and voter registration campaigns and strategies were the most dangerous — leading to the murders of several foot soldiers during Mississippi Freedom Summer and in other parts of the country. They were not about benefiting White businesses. They were about giving us the right to participate in our democracy and determine our own futures by voting.
When I saw Patricia’s image in the tweet by Stacey Abrams, I wept — not because I felt weak but because I felt empowered. Patricia was arrested asking for a seat in a theater. Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon was arrested for knocking on the door for a seat to history. Earlier that week I saw the billboard in Tallahassee using the same image of Patricia in a campaign by the Dream Defenders. They are a group of young Black, Latinx and Arab youth formed after the killing of Trayvon Martin who occupied the Florida Capitol for a month demanding a change to the “stand your ground” law. I hosted the group’s leaders in my “Freedom House” several years ago to share with them the tactics and strategy of nonviolent protest used by Patricia and so many others during the civil rights movement. The billboard was part of a campaign to oppose and bring attention to the dangers of Florida House Bill 1, which sadly passed the Florida Senate on Thursday. The bill is designed to squelch the First Amendment-guaranteed right to peacefully protest and criminalize those who do. What is going on in Georgia and Florida is a modern-day civil war caused by our nation’s self-identity crisis based on fear and lies. We cannot let these efforts to oppress the vote and our right to protest dismantle what so many people have lived and died for.
Jim Crow 2.0 is alive and well. But so is the freedom spirit of Patricia. And in confronting that spirit, Jim Crow 2.0 will not survive.
We will not be intimidated and will never give up. The image of Patricia, with all of her relentless strength and determination, is a rallying cry that we must heed.
Tananarive Due
When I saw Mom’s photo on Stacey Abrams’s page in the fight against “Jim Crow 2.0” and the efforts in Georgia and other states to make it harder for Black people and others to vote, I thought about how Mom always signed copies of the civil rights memoir we co-wrote: “The Struggle Continues.” For her, The Struggle was lifelong.
My 85-year-old father, “Freedom Lawyer” John Due, was an aspiring law student in Indiana when he read about my mother, then Patricia Stephens, in Jet magazine in 1960. She was one of seven Florida A&M University students who chose the pioneering tactic of “jail over bail” and served 49 days in jail after a sit-in at a Whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee.
Students received support in a telegram from Martin Luther King, Jr. When baseball legend Jackie Robinson published a letter Mom smuggled out of jail in his column in the New York Post, support and letters from around the world poured in. Once freed, she and her sister, my aunt Priscilla Stephens (Kruize) went on a speaking tour where they attended events hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Belafonte.
As soon as Dad saw Mom in Jetand learned about the fledgling civil rights movement in Florida, he applied to FAMU’s law school and met her by fall. Both of them wanted to enact social change: Mom through direct action and Dad through the law. By 1963, they were married.
Mom and my Aunt Priscilla had grown up in Belle Glade, Fla., where she was an activist even as a child. Mom ignored the WHITES ONLY sign in the window of the ice cream shop and circulated a petition to try to get rid of her high school principal (whom she considered substandard) in anticipation of integration after the Brown v. the Board of Education decision in 1954.
Throughout the 1960s, Mom risked her life and future to lead protests over segregated lunch counters and movie theaters, and for voting rights and worker rights. After a Tallahassee police officer tear-gassed her for leading a nonviolent protest in 1960, she wore dark glasses even indoors the rest of her entire adult life because she was so sensitive to light. After the 1960s, raising me and my two sisters, Johnita and Lydia, Mom was a leader in education and parents’ rights. She never stopped fighting for a better world.
Today, both of my parents have been inducted into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
I know Mom would be proud to have her picture featured in today’s ongoing struggles for civil and human rights.
Patricia Stephens Due, in the foreground wearing dark glasses, during a protest at the Florida Theater in Tallahassee in 1963. She wore dark glasses as a result of an eye injury from tear gas. (State Archives of Florida)
Tananarive Due, is an author, screenwriter and lecturer at UCLA. She is co-author of Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights with Patricia Stephens Due.
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