Patricia Murphy Derian was an American civil rights and human rights activist who opposed racism in Mississippi and went on to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1977 to 1981.
15 Facts About Patricia Derian
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Patricia Derian was, remembered The Times of London, "a courageous champion of civil rights who took on some of the world's most brutal dictators in her role as a senior American diplomat".
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Patricia Derian was educated at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, graduating in 1952.
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Patricia Derian married Paul Derian following graduation, and worked as a nurse.
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Patricia Derian was a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement.
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Patricia Derian helped organize the Loyalist Democrats as a challenge to the state's all-white official delegation and was elected as one of Mississippi's delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
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Patricia Derian remained active in civil rights in the 1970s, serving as president of the Southern Regional Council and was a member of the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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President Carter had the post elevated to that of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs effective August 17,1977, and Patricia Derian served in that capacity for the remainder of the Carter administration.
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In 1978, Patricia Derian married Hodding Carter III, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.
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Amongst those Patricia Derian believed the United States should not support was the Shah of Iran arguing in the lead up to the Iranian Revolution that the US should not be offering any assistance to the Shah "regardless of what cause those opponents might serve".
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Patricia Derian, who had headed an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights delegation in 1979 to investigate reports of widespread human rights abuses in Argentina, returned to Buenos Aires in 1985 to testify in the historic Trial of the Juntas.
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Patricia Derian was quoted in documents in the National Security Archive openly accusing military leaders of torture of prisoners at a meeting in Argentina in 1977.
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An Argentinian journalist, Jacobo Timerman, who was tortured by the junta, credited Patricia Derian with saving him from execution.
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Patricia Derian died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on May 20,2016, after suffering Alzheimer's disease.
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Patricia Derian became a champion of oppressed people around the world, helping me exert pressure on dictatorships from Argentina to South Korea.