Patricia Murphy “Patt” Derian was born in 1929 in New York City. She attended nursing school at the University of Virginia and was a registered nurse.
A supporter of the Civil Rights movement, she relocated to Jackson, Mississippi in 1959, volunteering with the Head Start program and supporting desegregation efforts. She helped found the Loyalist Democrats and was elected as a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. She remained dedicated to civil rights work through her service as president of the Southern Regional Council and on the executive committee of the ACLU. The bulk of her papers at MSU Libraries focuses on her time in Mississippi in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Derian was a deputy director for the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign in 1976. Upon his election as President of the United States, Carter nominated her to the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs under Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, where she remained for the remainder of the Carter administration.
During her tenure at the State Department, Derian was credited with saving potentially thousands of political prisoners and rivals from oppressive regimes across the world. Notably, Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman said Derian saved him from certain death at the hands of the Junta, the de facto military government that ruled Argentina during late 1970s and early 1980. Although she unsuccessfully tried to free South Korean dissident Kim Dae-jung from imprisonment under the dictator Chun Doo-hwan, when Kim was later elected president of South Korea in 1997, he invited Derian to his inauguration as a special guest.
Following the Carter administration, Derian remained outspoken on issues of humanitarian policy, criticizing conservative Reagan-era diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick’s belief in supporting authoritarian dictatorships as an anti-communist measure and in 1987, criticizing Nixon-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his secret role in propping up the far-right Junta military government in Argentina.
Derian married then Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Hodding Carter III, in 1978. Carter was a part of prominent newspaper family and the son of lauded progressive journalist and publisher, Hodding Carter, Jr., whose papers are also held at MSU Libraries.
She died on May 20, 2016, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She had three children and three stepchildren.
Photo credit: The New York Times
