After the deeply entrenched walls of legalized racial segregation in America began to crumble in the early and mid-1950s, legions of courageous young college students joined the loosely knit campaign for justice in the later years of the decade and the early 1960s. Twenty-year-old Patricia Stephens was among them.
Stephens, a student in 1960 at Florida A & M University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, organized (with her sister, Priscilla, and three other FAMU students) and staged the first student sit-ins in the city. After being arrested for sitting at the `public’ lunch counter at Woolworth’s five-and-dime store, Stephens spent 49 days in a Tallahassee jail rather than pay a fine for breaking the law barring Whites and Blacks from dining in the same business establishment.
The daring action drew widespread praise from civil rights champions of the day, including the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (he wrote her a letter of encouragement while she was in jail) and Daisy Bates, leader of the 1957 Little Rock public schools desegregation efforts. Stephens won support from baseball legend Jackie Robinson (he sent her a diary in which she could write notes of her jail experience), entertainer Harry Belafonte, publisher John Johnson and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Stephens also heard from officials at FAMU. Under pressure from its governing board to send students a strong message about the risks of engaging in protests of the state and city’s racial segregation laws, the school suspended her – several times, it seems, as she and her cohorts would not relent in their crusade for equality.
