The Activist Who Spent the Rest of Her Life Living With Side Effects of Tear Gas
From 1960 until her death, Patricia Stephens Due had to wear dark glasses, a symbol of her lasting trauma
In the last six weeks, police around the country have met Black Lives Matter protesters with extreme responses — from rubber bullets to tear gas. For some, the result can be a lifelong disability.
It’s a reality writer Tananarive Due knows well; her mother, the civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due was teargassed by police in 1960 and lived with severe light sensitivity until her death in 2012. GEN asked Due to share what that experience was like for her mother and what current protesters can learn from the movement of the 1960s.
GEN: Your mother had a history in the civil rights movement that would be impossible to summarize, but let’s try. What do you think people who aren’t familiar with her work should know?
Tananarive Due: Well, first I want to say that my mother and I co-wrote a book together, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. And I think it’s important to mention that she never envisioned that book as a memoir. All my life she just wanted to help the activists she had known in the ’60s have an…
