Patricia Stephens Due and the Letter from Leon County Jail
Near Tallahassee, Florida
Content note: this track discusses racial violence including the use of tear gas against nonviolent protesters.
On February twentieth, nineteen sixty, eleven Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University students sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter on Monroe Street in Tallahassee and ordered food. When they were ordered to leave, they stayed. This was several days after the famous Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina, and word had traveled fast.
Among the students was Patricia Stephens, a twenty-year-old FAMU student and civil rights organizer. When police responded to the demonstration, an officer threw tear gas into the crowd. The chemical burned Stephens' eyes so severely that she spent the rest of her life wearing dark sunglasses to protect light-sensitive vision that never fully recovered.
Eleven of the students were arrested. Eight of them were offered a choice: pay a three-hundred-dollar fine or go to jail, and they chose jail. This made them the first sit-in participants in the United States to accept imprisonment rather than pay a fine, a strategy that would become central to the civil rights movement's moral argument about unjust laws.
Patricia Stephens spent forty-nine days in the Leon County Jail. From inside her cell, she wrote letters. One of those letters, smuggled out by visiting ministers, was published widely in civil rights circles. It became known as the Letter from Leon County Jail. Legal scholars have noted that this letter, written in the spring of nineteen sixty, predated Martin Luther King Junior's Letter from Birmingham Jail by three years and helped establish the genre of the jail letter as a civil rights tool.
Stephens went on to become one of Florida's most important civil rights organizers. She spent decades documenting the movement and, with her daughter Tananarive Due, wrote a memoir called Freedom in the Family. She died in two thousand twelve. Her eyesight, permanently damaged by that tear gas canister on Monroe Street, was the visible mark she carried from that February morning for the remaining fifty-two years of her life.
