She helped launch Florida’s Civil Rights Movement. Now Priscilla Stephens Kruize needs our help
TheGrio...
Priscilla Stephens Kruize played a key role in the civil rights movement at FAMU. Now, she needs support to cover her healthcare costs.
We often say we honor the people who fought for our freedom. Now, communities have an opportunity to directly help one of the women who academics like FAMU professor Dr. Dana Dennard say played a key role in kicking off the civil rights movement in Florida: Priscilla Stephens Kruize.
Kruize, 87, and her late sister, Patricia Stephens Due, founded the Tallahassee chapter of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and led the first major sit-in-turned-jail-in while attending Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. On February 20, 1960, the Stephens sisters were among the many students who sat in at the Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Tallahassee. Refusing to leave, the sisters, along with 9 other students, were arrested for “disturbing the peace.” However, instead of paying the $300 fine they received for the non-violent sit-in, Patricia, Priscilla, and other students chose to stay in jail for 49 days as a form of protest– a tactic that would later be adopted across the country under the slogan “Jail, No Bail.”
“Every night before I go to sleep I thank God that in some small way that I am able to help those of us who are denied our equal rights. I do not consider going to jail a sacrifice but a privilege,” Kruize once wrote in a letter written during the jail-in, per the Florida Memory. “Sixty days are not long to spend in jail. I’d do it again for a cause as great as the one I’m fighting for.”
The sisters’ activism with CORE drew the attention of civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson. However, the sisters’ fight for civil rights did not stop there. From organizing non-violent demonstrations on campus to working with the Freedom Riders, upon their release, Priscilla and her sister Patricia toured the nation to spread the word about racial discrimination and the dangers of Jim Crow laws.
“Nobody did civil rights like my sister and I did,” Kruize said in a 2017 interview with WCTV News. “We just believed that we were doing the right thing. We were doing the right thing.”
She ultimately dedicated her life to teaching and building Florida’s first Black Heritage Museum, which she founded in the 1990s while working as a second-grade teacher. The museum, which Kruize’s niece says is now accumulating storage fees, includes replicas of the Tallahassee jail cells, and the lunch counter she and other FAMU students sat in, along with her collection of international paintings, figurines, and more.
“We want children to see that after all that we went through, we still survived,” Kruize shared in a 1991 interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Now, her niece Tananarive Due is calling on community support as the family navigates the civil rights heroine’s declining health and the fees needed to move her into an assisted living facility.
“Due to spinal stenosis at age 87, she is suddenly unable to properly care for herself or live on her own,” Due wrote on the GoFundMe page. “She has worked tirelessly to inspire young people and help keep Black History alive. But as a result, she has been living on only Social Security and a small pension from teaching. Her family is navigating the bureaucracy to get her the financial assistance she needs, but the process takes weeks or months – so this is a short-term fundraiser to make sure she can live safely until her ongoing financial aid is in place. These funds would help cover her monthly housing and care as well as storage fees so her belongings are not lost. Family members have also been assisting her, but the costs are very high and will continue to accrue.”
“Please give whatever you can to help Priscilla Stephens Kruize during her time of need after she has given so much to others in her quest to make this a better country for all,” she concluded.