Patricia Stephens Due | Civil rights leader, 72

Patricia Stephens Due, 72, whose belief that, as she put it, "ordinary people can do extraordinary things" propelled her to leadership in the civil rights movement, died Tuesday in Smyrna, Ga.

The cause was thyroid cancer, her daughter Johnita Due said.

At 13, Patricia Stephens challenged Jim Crow orthodoxy by trying to use the "whites only" window at a Dairy Queen. As a college student, she led demonstrations to integrate lunch counters, theaters, and swimming pools and was repeatedly arrested.

As a young mother, she pushed two children in a stroller while campaigning for the rights of poor people. As a veteran of integration and voting-rights battles, she went on to fight for economic rights.

She fought beside John D. Due Jr., a civil rights lawyer, whom she married in 1963. For their honeymoon, they rode the Freedom Train to Washington to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Ms. Due paid a price for this devotion. She wore large, dark glasses day and night because her eyes were damaged when a tear gas canister hit her in the face. She took a decade to graduate from Florida A&M University because of suspensions for her activism.

Ms. Due's greatest prominence came after she and 10 other students were arrested for sitting at the "whites only" lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in Tallahassee, Fla., on Feb. 20, 1960. It was 19 days after four black students in Greensboro, N.C., had made civil rights history by doing the same thing. Ms. Due and seven others refused to pay $300 fines for violating laws they abhorred. Five served the full 49-day sentence.

Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, questioned whether it was all worth it, given the deplorable state of Southern jails. But the drama of righteous incarceration seized the nation's attention, a freed Ms. Due went on a national fund-raising tour, and the "jail-in" became a movement standard. - N.Y. Times News Service