Sarah Patton Boyle

Last updated
Sarah Patton Boyle
Sarah Patton Boyle.jpg
by Holsinger Studio, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch
Born
Sarah-Lindsay Patton

(1906-05-09)May 9, 1906
near Charlottesville, Virginia
DiedFebruary 20, 1994(1994-02-20) (aged 87)
Arlington, Virginia
NationalityAmerican
OccupationCivil rights activist, writer
Years active1950-1967
Notable workThe Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition (1962)
Spouse E. Roger Boyle

Sarah-Lindsay Patton "Pattie" Boyle (May 9, 1906 - February 20, 1994) was an American author and civil rights activist from Virginia during the Civil Rights Movement. She is the author of The Desegregated Heart and various articles and books about race relations in Virginia and the South. [1] Boyle was a "faculty wife" of drama professor, E. Roger Boyle, at the University of Virginia. [2] Boyle was the first white person to serve on the board of directors for the Charlottesville NAACP chapter. [3] She was "an outspoken advocate for desegregation in her native South." [2]

Contents

Biography

Boyle was born near Charlottesville, Virginia, on an Albemarle County plantation which dated back to the Colonial era. [4] Her father was an Episcopalian clergyman who was the director of the American Church Institute of the Protestant Episcopal Church. [2] Boyle was a cousin to General George S. Patton. [3] Her grandparents were veterans of the Civil War and had fought for the Confederate States. [2] As a young person, her family followed a "Southern Code" in which her family expected her to only have "formal relations with blacks." [2] Boyle grew up with black servants, who she was allowed to be friends with until she turned twelve and was inducted into the "Southern Code." [5] She also grew up with stories about her family, which also included the Revolutionary War general, Hugh Mercer, and the "great legal mind," John Mercer Patton. [5] Her father also worked to instill a sense of Christian morality and encouraged Boyle to right the wrongs she saw in the world. [5] Boyle was home-schooled because of dyslexia and didn't learn to read until she was in her teens. [6] As a young adult, she went to the Corcoran School of Art. [2]

In 1932, she married drama and speech professor, E. Roger Boyle. [2] They had two sons together; E. Roger Boyle, III was born in 1939 and Patton Lindsay Boyle was born in 1943. [6] Also in the 1940s, she and her husband began to see that they were incompatible as a married couple and were later divorced in 1965. [4] Until her sons were in their late teens, she was housewife, but around 1950, she began to write magazine articles. [5]

At the university, she had become friends with a black woman who was able to pass as white. [2] She also began to question her prejudices after hearing her father give a speech at Howard University. [2]

Boyle became involved loosely with Gregory Swanson, who was admitted to the University of Virginia law school in 1950 after a lawsuit was filed since he'd previously been denied entry due to his race. [2] Swanson's case affected Boyle strongly because she had wrongly "assumed that blacks did not associate with whites because blacks preferred it that way." [5] The Swanson case showed her that not all blacks desired segregation and Boyle began to feel that segregation was truly wrong. [7] She wrote to him to welcome him to the university, thinking that she was one of many white people who agreed that segregation was wrong. [8] Through her involvement with Swanson she eventually met T. J. Sellers, the editor of the black newspaper in Charlottesville, The Tribune. [2] During this time, she became one of a few white supporters of desegregation in Virginia, writing hundreds of articles and speeches imploring immediate integration. [5] Her fight for desegregation was praised by name in Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." [5] [9]

Boyle died in Arlington, Virginia inside her home due to complications from Alzheimer's disease. [10] She was buried near where she was born. [4]

Civil rights activism

Boyle's first letter was to the Richmond Times-Dispatch , called a "Plea for Tolerance." Boyle believed that whites and blacks alike would reply in kind, but instead she found silence from the community at large, which she interpreted as fear to speak out. [5] In 1951, Reader's Digest offered her a chance to write about Swanson and his case, however, after showing her essay to Swanson himself, he "denounced her words without explanation and walked away," and Boyle never published her work. [5] Swanson said that "While her heart may be in the right place, she possesses strains of paternalism which I utterly deplore." [11] After consulting other black ministers and editors, she found similar responses, which T. J. Sellers pointed out that she was paternalistic and condescending in tone. [5] Later, Boyle would look back at her writing and how she felt, and realize that she was "motivated largely by class pretensions and a self-styled 'maternalism' that she later repudiated." [8] Boyle wanted to unlearn her racial prejudices and Sellers became her teacher and close friend. [5] Their conversations were humorously referred to by one another as the "T. J. Sellers Course for Backward Southern Whites." [4]

Boyle became an outspoken advocate for immediate integration through her conversations with Sellers. [4] She began to write regularly for Sellers's paper in a weekly column called "From Behind the Curtain." [4] Her works were considered to be about "the development and maintenance of good human relations between all people." [12] Boyle became part of the public attention in 1954 when she spoke at the Virginia General Assembly's Commission on Public Education where she advocated school integration. [4]

On August 29, 1956, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in her front yard, [5] most likely in response to her article "Southerners Will Like Integration" for the Saturday Evening Post . [6] Instead of being afraid, Boyle was reported to laugh and called for her teen son to take a picture of the cross. [5] The purpose of her article for the Post was to convince white Southerners that integration could be done amicably, however the way the article was received by white readers called to mind the idea of "interracial sex" because of the title and the picture of Boyle walking with two black male medical students. [13] Boyle received hate mail and threatening phone calls in addition to the burning cross. [13] She was also "subjected to repeated snubs and slights" and while her friends agreed with her in private, "none sided with her in public." [11]

Boyle was part of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. [6]

She was arrested at a 1964 Monson Motor Lodge protests in St. Augustine, Florida. [3] She and 11 other activists were arrested while they performed a sit-in at the restaurant at the motor lodge. [14]

Boyle retired from her activism in 1967. [4] She found that her personal convictions clashed with the "realpolitik of the late 1960s." [8] However, she continued to write and explored the topic of age discrimination during her retirement. [4]

Legacy

Boyle was honored by the City of Charlottesville for her work in civil rights on May 8, 2001. [3] Her name also appears on a bronze plaque on the Drewary Brown Bridge recognizing her as "bridge builder." [3] Boyle's papers are located at the University of Virginia Library in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. [15] A marker on the ACCORD Freedom Trail in St. Augustine, Florida notes her arrest at the Monson Motor Lodge in 1964; an event she was proud of.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Civil rights movement</span> 1954–1968 U.S. social movement against institutional racism

The civil rights movement was a political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's decision in Brown paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Desegregation busing</span> Effort to diversify the racial make-up of schools in the United States

Race-integration busing in the United States was the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts in an effort to diversify the racial make-up of schools. While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely uni-racial due to housing inequality. In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern strategy</span> 20th century Republican electoral strategy for the Southern US

In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s.

Racial equality is a situation in which people of all races and ethnicities are treated in an egalitarian/equal manner. Racial equality occurs when institutions give individuals legal, moral, and political rights. In present-day Western society, equality among races continues to become normative. Prior to the early 1960s, attaining equality was difficult for African, Asian, and Indigenous people. However, in more recent years, racial equality has become part of laws generally ensuring that all individuals receive equal opportunities in treatment, education, employment, and other areas of life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Racial integration</span> Process of ending racial segregation

Racial integration, or simply integration, includes desegregation. In addition to desegregation, integration includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely bringing a racial minority into the majority culture. Desegregation is largely a legal matter, integration largely a social one.

Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia and his brother-in-law James M. Thomson, who represented Alexandria in the Virginia General Assembly, to get the state's white politicians to pass laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration, before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional.

This is a timeline of African-American history, the part of history that deals with African Americans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Segregation academy</span> Segregationist private schools in the US

Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Braden</span>

Anne McCarty Braden was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and educator dedicated to the cause of racial equality. She and her husband bought a suburban house for an African American couple during Jim Crow. White neighbors burned crosses and bombed the house. During McCarthyism, Anne was charged with sedition. She wrote and organized for the southern civil rights movement before violations became national news. Anne was among nation's most outspoken white anti-racist activists, organizing across racial divides in environmental, women's, and anti-nuclear movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johnnie Carr</span>

Johnnie Rebecca Daniels Carr was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from 1955 until her death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Crow laws</span> State and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the South had adopted laws, beginning in the late 19th century, banning discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black school</span> Educational institutes for black people

Black schools, also referred to as "colored" schools, were racially segregated schools in the United States that originated after the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. The phenomenon began in the late 1860s during Reconstruction era when Southern states under biracial Republican governments created public schools for the formerly enslaved. They were typically segregated. After 1877, conservative whites took control across the South. They continued the black schools, but at a much lower funding rate than white schools.

The Pearsall Plan to Save Our Schools, known colloquially as the Pearsall Plan, was North Carolina's 1956 attempt at a delayed approach to integrate their public schools after racial segregation of schools was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Many southern states were challenged by the Brown ruling as they faced opposition to integration from residents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School segregation in the United States</span> Racial separation in schools

School segregation in the United States is the separation of students based on their race. This has taken two forms, legally mandated segregation (historically), and segregation in fact. In the United States, public schools are primarily a U.S. state and local matter, not a national matter, and historically, public school systems in parts of the United States were racially segregated by law. All such laws were overturned in the 1950s and 1960s, but for a variety of reasons racial concentrations continue in many areas. Currently more than half of all students in the United States attend school districts with high racial concentrations and about 40% of black students attend schools where 90%-100% of students are non-white. Contemporary school racial segregation is most noticeable in California and New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School integration in the United States</span> Racial desegregation process

School integration in the United States is the process of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.

This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.

Thomas Jerome Sellers, was an African American journalist, newspaper editor, newspaper publisher, and educator from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Prior to the civil rights movement in South Carolina, African Americans in the state had very few political rights. South Carolina briefly had a majority-black government during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, but with the 1876 inauguration of Governor Wade Hampton III, a Democrat who supported the disenfranchisement of blacks, African Americans in South Carolina struggled to exercise their rights. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation kept African Americans from voting, and it was virtually impossible for someone to challenge the Democratic Party, which ran unopposed in most state elections for decades. By 1940, the voter registration provisions written into the 1895 constitution effectively limited African-American voters to 3,000—only 0.8 percent of those of voting age in the state.

Constance Winifred Curry was an American civil rights activist, educator, and writer. A longtime opponent of racial discrimination, she was the first white woman to serve on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

References

  1. ↑ "Boyle, Sarah-Patton, 1906-". Civil Rights Digital Library. Digital Library of Georgia. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Houck, Davis W.; Dixon, David E., eds. (2009). "Sarah Patton Boyle: November 7, 1954, NAACP, Gainesville, Virginia". Women and the Civil Rights Movement. pp. 10–16. ISBN   9781604737608. JSTOR   j.ctt2tvf4t.5.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Houck, Davis W.; Dixon, David E., eds. (2006). Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965. Vol. 1. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. pp. 79–80. ISBN   9781932792546.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Ritter, Jennifer (2004). "Boyle, Sarah Lindsay Patton". In Ware, Susan (ed.). Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 76–77. ISBN   9780674014886.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Dierenfield, Kathleen Murphy (1996). "One "Desegregated Heart": Sarah Patton Boyle and the Crusade for Civil Rights in Virginia". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 104 (2): 251–284. JSTOR   4249566.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Ritterhouse, Jennifer (29 June 2014). "Sarah Patton Boyle (1906–1994)". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  7. ↑ "Sara P. Boyle to Speak Feb. 1" . Orrville Courier Crescent. 21 January 1965. Retrieved 25 November 2015– via Newspaper Archive.
  8. 1 2 3 Ritterhouse, Jennifer (1999). "Speaking of Race: Sarah Patton Boyle and the "T. J. Sellers Course for Backward Southern Whites"". In Hodes, Martha (ed.). Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History . New York: New York University Press. pp.  491–513. ISBN   9780814735565. sarah patton boyle.
  9. ↑ Baird-Remba, Rebecca (16 April 2013). "MLK Writes Incredible Letter From Alabama Jail — 50 Years Ago Today". Business Insider. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  10. ↑ "Sarah Patton Boyle Author and Rights Advocate, 87". The New York Times. 5 March 1994. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  11. 1 2 Leidholdt, Alexander S. (2014). "Showdown on Mr. Jefferson's Lawn" . Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 122 (3): 230–271. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  12. ↑ "Woman's Day Scheduled at State College" . Charleston Daily Mail. 29 April 1956. Retrieved 25 November 2015– via Newspaper Archive.
  13. 1 2 Wolfe, Brendan (19 February 2013). "This Day (Cruel Irony Edition)". Encyclopedia of Virginia. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  14. ↑ "Dr. King Shifted to New Jail" . Pacific Stars and Stripes. 15 June 1964. Retrieved 25 November 2015– via Newspaper Archive.
  15. ↑ "Papers of Sarah Patton Boyle". The American Folklife Center. Library of Congress. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.