Tananarive Due, daughter of civil rights activists Patricia Stephens Due and John Due, remembers the March on Washington from her parents’ stories. USA Today interviewed Tananarive about the event on August 19.
Patricia Stephens Due, together with her husband John Due, presented a public program “An Evening with the Dues: Pioneers in the Civil Rights Movement” with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida in February 2011. In 1960, Patricia Stephens Due and five other students from Florida A&M University made history when they chose a jail cell rather than paying a fine for sitting at a “Whites Only” lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. The 49 days Due served in jail represented the first “jail-in” of the Civil Rights Movement, and the beginning of her lifelong fight for human and civil rights in America. John D. Due, Jr. is a prominent civil rights attorney who was selected by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to serve as Field Secretary for the organization’s first voter education and registration project in North Florida. Due’s work in Florida registered more African Americans to vote than another region in the South.
Tananarive Due and her father John Due worked with SPOHP in McComb, Mississippi in February for the McComb Legacies Project student-led conference documentary premiere. John Due also travels with SPOHP on our Mississippi Freedom Project research trip to teach students about civil rights history.
John Due is an interviewee in MFP-109 and MFP-113 (Mississippi Freedom Project), and WAF-020 (Women Activist Feminists) at SPOHP.
Read the full article: USA Today, “Tananarive Due’s parents left her civil rights lessons,” by Steph Solis August 19, 2013. Tananarive Due is a professor at Spelman College, where she is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities. Visit her website.