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Sarah Patton Boyle
Sarah-Lindsay Patton “Pattie” Boyle (May 9, 1906 - February 20, 1994) was an American author and civil rights activist from Virginia. She was the first white person to serve on the board of directo...view moreSarah-Lindsay Patton “Pattie” Boyle (May 9, 1906 - February 20, 1994) was an American author and civil rights activist from Virginia. She was the first white person to serve on the board of directors for the Charlottesville NAACP chapter. She is the author of The Desegregated Heart and various articles and books about race relations in Virginia and the South.
Born near Charlottesville, Virginia on an Albemarle County plantation which dated back to the Colonial era, Boyle was a cousin to General George S. Patton and her grandparents were veterans of the Civil War who had fought for the Confederate States. She grew up with black servants, who she was allowed to be friends with until she turned twelve and was inducted into the "Southern Code." And her family expected her to have only "formal relations with blacks."
In 1932 she married E. Roger Boyle, a drama and speech professor of the University of Virginia, and they had two sons. The couple divorced in 1965, but it was whilst she was a “faculty wife” at Virginia University that Pattie Boyle became friends with a black woman who was able to pass as white, and she began to question her own prejudices.
She began writing magazine articles around 1950 when, through Gregory Swanson, the first African-American student admitted to University of Virginia Law School, she met T. J. Sellers, the editor of the black newspaper in Charlottesville, The Tribune. Boyle became one of a few white supporters of desegregation in Virginia, writing hundreds of articles and speeches imploring immediate integration.
Her fight for desegregation was praised by name in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Boyle died in Arlington, Virginia in 1994 aged 84.view less
Books by Sarah Patton Boyle
The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition