By Tananarive Due

Fifty years ago, my mother, Dr. Patricia Stephens Due, and my aunt, Priscilla Stephens Kruize, were among five Florida A&M University students who spent 49 days in jail after being arrested for ordering food at a Tallahassee Woolworth lunch counter—the first “jail-in” in the fledgling civil rights movement of the 1960s. Their sit-ins were sparked by the famed February 1, 1960, Woolworth lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Last week, hundreds of current students gathered on FAMU’s Tallahassee campus to reenact the former students’ historic sit-ins, jail-in and march. My father, sister, aunt and uncle were among the community members and former activists who saw history come to life.

My mother is 70 now, and my father, semi-retired civil rights attorney John Due, is 75. Mom says it feels like only yesterday when she was twenty years old, joining an army of courageous Americans defying friends, colleagues and parents to walk into their page of history.

Today, my parents’ battle is a battle for health. My mother is recovering from a long illness, so she was not well enough to attend FAMU’s tribute. But her passion always has been to tell the story of “foot-soldiers.”

“There were hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who did extraordinary things,” Mom always tells us, as she wrote on the opening page of the book we co-authored, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (2003).

During the reenactment, a student dressed as a police officer shouted “I want you!” and threw a teargas canister into the face of a female student portraying my mother. Hissing smoke swirled while student actors screamed and rubbed their eyes.

On Feb. 20, 1960, eleven FAMU students, including my mother and aunt, were arrested for ordering food at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter. Two were only in high school: Charles and Henry Steele, sons of prominent Tallahassee pastor Rev. C.K. Steele. Mary Ola Gaines, the only local “adult” who participated, lost her job as a housekeeper as a result.

On March 12, dozens of FAMU and Florida State University students participating in sit-ins at McCrory’s and Woolworth’s were arrested and marched handcuffed through town in interracial pairs. Another group of students was met by an armed mob outside of McCrory’s.

Soon, a thousand students with hand-written placards like “Give Us Back Our Students” began marching from the campus toward downtown Tallahassee.

They never made it. Police officers and teargas were waiting at the railroad tracks. A police officer singled my mother out with a teargas canister and a shout of “I want you!”

“Why does Grandma wear dark glasses?” my son Jason asked me when he was 4-1/2. It was the eve of the 2008 Presidential election, when my sisters and I were bringing our families to my parents’ house to watch new history unfold.

My mother suffers sensitivity to light even fifty years later. Recently, I’ve heard about other activists complaining of lingering eye problems too. Who really knows the true toll?

My mother and the other sit-in participants were tried on March 17, 1960, openly referred to as “niggers” during testimony. When a judge found them guilty, eight refused to pay the $300 fine—deciding instead to go to jail.

Five Florida A&M students served 49 days at the Leon County Jail: My mother and aunt; a brother and sister named John Broxton and Barbara Broxton; and incoming student government president William Larkins.

Three other students—Clement Carney, Angelina Nance, and 16-year-old high school student Henry Marion Steele, son of activist pastor Rev. C.K. Steele—also served time in jail.

“I remember Mama crying for days because Henry was locked up,” says Darryl Steele, who sang at the tribute to honor his brother, Rev. Henry Steele, who couldn’t attend because of a conflict.

“Just thinking about it, sitting there watching it, was quite an emotional thing.” The “Jail-in,” the first of its kind in the student sit-in movement, gained nationwide attention. An aspiring civil rights lawyer and Indiana University student named John Due read about my mother in Jet magazine, and he decided to go to law school at FAMU to be closer to the civil rights movement—and so my parents met.

The jailed students got a surprise telegram two days after their trial: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote to them: I have just learned of your courageous willingness to go to jail instead of paying fines for your righteous protest against segregated eating facilities…Dr. King began. …You have discovered anew the meaning of the cross, and as Christ died to make men holy, you are suffering to make men free.

Baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, writing a column for the New York Post, published a letter a local minister had smuggled out of jail for my mother. We are happy we are able to do this to help our city, state and nation, Mom wrote in her letter. We strongly believe that Martin Luther King was right when he said, “We’ve got to fill the jails to win our equal rights.”

Robinson later sent the jailed students diaries so they could write down their experiences—my aunt still has hers. After the jail-in, participants participated in speaking tours to help publicize the civil rights movement. In New York, Eleanor Roosevelt cited my mother’s story when she sent out invitations to a civil rights fundraiser.

The recent tribute was designed to reflect my mother’s desire to create dialogue between the generations,” says organizer Dr. Murell Dawkins, curator and archivist at FAMUS’s Carrie Meek-James Eaton Black Archives and Museum. “She was adamant about connecting the students to the foot-soldiers,” she said.

My Aunt Priscilla, a retired educator, was tearful but inspired by the students’ presentation. “Someone is there to carry it on,” she said.

My sister Johnita Due, a media attorney, added: “Seeing my mother and aunt’s experiences unfold before our very eyes…inspired all who attended by showing us the sacrifices that were made. It reminded us that each one of us can make a difference.”

“Jail over Bail,” was written and directed by FAMU journalism associate professor Yanela Gordon, who used research from Freedom in the Family and The Pain and the Promise, by Tallahassee historian Glenda Rabby.

“I honestly believe the torch was passed and accepted,” Gordon said.

Kennard Speed, a 23-year-old FAMU graduate student, thinks so too.

“Nowadays, we don’t have students who are willing to stand up for what they believe in and try to make change,” said Speed, a Miami graduate student who was a narrator. “We are so easily deterred from what we want to do when we face some kind of obstacle in our path.”

Alisa Routh, a 20-year-old junior from Atlanta, agrees. She was another narrator.

“Once I read the script, I really felt a strong obligation to be involved because it was such a big part of FAMU students’ history,” Routh told me. “When I think about the struggle and all the things your mother and aunt went through, I just knew I had to participate.”

Fifty years later, the activists my parents knew in the 1960s have taken on a different, and more personal, role in their lives.

Like Dr. Glee, an educator who marched with my mother in the 1960s, but never got a chance to know her well before she saw herself on the book cover of Freedom in the Family. And Dan Harmeling, a white activist from Wisconsin whose twin brother, Jim, committed suicide in 1967, disillusioned with his nation after his civil rights involvement in Florida. And Mary Lee Blount, whose mother, the late Dorothy Jones, sheltered my mother and other activists during 1960s voter registration drives and had a cross burned in her yard.

These days, they don’t march together—instead, they help my mother walk. And heal. And laugh. And share stories and memories from a path only they truly understand.

A 32-year-old white pharmacist who works near my parents, Burton Dunaway, recently helped them plant a maple sapling in their yard to commemorate the foot soldiers of the 1960s. The tree was planted partially with soil my mother scooped up from ground near the White House when our family attended the inauguration of President Barack Obama last January.

That tree was my mother’s 70th birthday wish, another dream come to life. Once again, she wanted to plant something that would grow—and stand tall for generations.

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award-winning novelist, author of Blood Colony, Joplin’s Ghost, The Good House and My Soul to Keep. In 2009, she and her husband, Steven Barnes, and actor Blair Underwood won a 2009 NAACP Image Award for their mystery novel In the Night of the Heat. Her websites are www.tananarivedue.com and www.tananarivedue.blogspot.com

Florida A&M Univesity’s Feb. 19 program, “Revisiting the Battlefield: Mobilizing the Foot Soldiers of the Civil Rights Era,” was co-sponsored by the FAMU Student Government Association, the Leon County Board of County Commissioners, the FAMU Office of Student Activities, the Carrie Meek-James Eaton Black Archives/Museum and the FAMU School of Journalism and Graphic Communication.