A civil rights activist throughout her life, Patricia Stephens Due was a stellar impetus as the nation’s first jail-in participant during her college years in Tallahassee, Florida. Patricia Stephens Due (née Stephens) was born in Quincy, Florida on December 9, 1939 as a middle child of three children. In 1952 at the age of thirteen, she and her sister dared the segregation laws of the South when they stood in a ‘Whites only’ line, ignoring the ‘Colored only’ sign at a Dairy Queen. After graduating from high school, Due was accepted to Florida A&M University (FAMU) in the fall of 1957. In the middle of the summer in 1959, Patricia Stephens, along with her sister were present at an interracial seminar that was sponsored by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). The topic was about non-violent civil disobedience. Thereupon, she arranged FAMU students --a total of five who were led by her sister to participate in a lunch counter sit-in. This first sparked her enduring devoir to civil and human rights setbacks for African-Americans. Nineteen days after four African-American students were arrested in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, she and ten other students were arrested. She was jailed for forty-nine days, rather than pay a $300 fine for her part in sitting at the ‘White’s only’ lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in Florida. In 1963, Stephens married a FAMU law student (John D. Due Jr.) who became a noticeable civil rights attorney. During the following year, she was chosen by CORE under the title of Field Secretary for their first voter education and registration initiative. With her assistance, the North Florida CORE proposition was able to register more African-Americans than other regions of the South. Following her triumph with the voting rights venture, she advanced with involvements in protest marches and boycotts. Due suffered from damage to her eyes after being hit in the face with a hissing tear gas canister. As a result, she would be seen wearing large dark shades, day and night for the rest of her life. She had a FBI file more than 400 pages long and denounced giving up her fight for civil rights, even after her stepfather begged her to for her own protection and his career. For her activism involvement, she was suspended several times from FAMU. Due began to have speaking and fundraising tours that hindered her studies and she did not earn her degree until a decade later in 1967. Her commitment to civil rights lasted for more than forty years. She was known for teaching and inspiring younger generations of all nationalities about protecting our Constitutional rights. Due has traveled across the country educating thousands of high school and college students, teachers, parents, church and civic organizations. In 2003 she became a co-novelist with her daughter when they wrote “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights”. She was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from her alma mater FAMU. Due also received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Outstanding Leadership, the Ghandi Award for Outstanding Work in Human Relations, courtesy of FAMU and the NAACP Florida Freedom Award. She succumbed on February 7, 2012.

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