Freedom In The Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir Of The Fight For Civil Rights
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Due, T. & Stephens-Due, P. (2003). Freedom in the Family A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. New York: The Random Housing Publishing Group Freedom in the Family was written to review the outlooks of two generations of women; a mother and daughter go into detail about their experience of the struggle African Americans had to face for civil rights, from the beginning of the civil rights era until today. The book was written during the Civil Rights era which took place in the 1950s and 60s. Patricia Stephens Due made it her duty to fight for justice during the violent Civil Rights movements of the 50’s and 60’s, which she was also an activist of. She even gave up her own freedom because she felt that it was only right for…show more content… Patricia was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. to keep his dream alive and fight for civil rights for African Americans. Patricia was a student at Florida A&M University, in the 1960s where she and her sister Priscilla would make history for having a role in the movement’s “jail-in.” This is when students decided to have a sit-in movement where they did not pay for a fine, they gave their time instead. Three FAMU students along with Patricia and her sister, sat locked up in jail for forty-nine days because they did not pay for the crime they had committed, which was sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter. Her story also takes the reader through a series of events which included a vast number of arrests, and her coming in contact with Martin Luther King Jr. and baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who was also an activist during this time. This event led to the lifelong commitment of fighting for not only civil, but human rights as well. Patricia and her husband, John Due who was a civil rights lawyer worked alongside with a vast number of the movement’s greatest leaders to bring about change in the South, especially the state of