About Dr. Gwendolyn
Dr. Gwendolyn was born in a small town outside Detroit, Michigan called Inkster. After the passing of her mother, at the age of 16, Gwen moved to Montgomery, Alabama to live with her grandmother. Upon her arrival, she immediately became a leader in the Montgomery Improvement Association.
Before long, she was teaching in the “citizenship schools,” a tutoring program to help prospective voters learn how to fill out the literacy test, the prerequisite barrier before Black people could become registered voters. Citizenship Schools were held in both of her grandparents’ homes, one on the west side and the other on the east side. Gwen convinced her maternal grandmother to use the second home as a “Freedom House” for such Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizers as Reverend James Orange and Reverend James Bevel.
She was a youth founding member of the (Black) Alabama Democratic Conference in 1960, an organization dedicated to getting Black people registered as voters. As a student at Tuskegee University, she served as the first female student government association president. As a SNCC organizer, she was one of the founders of its Women’s Commission and based on Freedom of Information files, Gwen was under surveillance and classified under active investigation by the FBI and the CIA.
Patton continues to travel throughout the world and is frequently asked to serve as an election observer in South and Central America and Africa.
Dr. Patton earned her bachelor’s degree in English and history from Tuskegee. She earned her master’s in history and the art of teaching from Antioch College, and her doctorate in political history and higher education administration from Union Graduate School.
Gwen is a fourth-generation member of Hutchinson Missionary Baptist Church, where she serves as Sunday school teacher and on the Board of Christian Education.
Her movement activities were interspersed with teaching at several colleges in the East and Southeast. Gwen returned to Montgomery in 1985 and continued her movement activities while teaching at local universities and colleges. While there, she learned that many of her older comrades had not been celebrated and lifted up the way that they should have been. She immediately had them as her television guests on Harambee, a PBS program that she hosted. Gwen also found out that her elders had been waiting on her to return home. They had kept artifacts from the movement that they only wanted to entrust to her. One lady had loaned an amazing scrapbook to Mrs. Coretta Scott King, and then requested for Mrs. King to return the scrapbook for Gwen’s care. Mrs. King promptly told her the good news: The scrapbook was on loan to the Smithsonian. The lady asked, “Well, who is he?” The Smithsonian promptly returned the scrapbook.
Dr. Patton now works as an archivist for H. Councill Trenholm State Technical College, which houses special collections of Pioneers of the Voting Rights Movement.
She continues to be in great demand, locally, nationally, and internationally, as a speaker and lecturer on the civil/voting rights movement. Dr. Patton is Montgomery Coordinator for the National Historic Voting Rights Trail and serves on its National Advisory Council.
