Patricia M Derian

Patricia Murphy was born in New York City and grew up in Danville, Virginia. She was educated at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, graduating in 1952. She married Paul Derian following graduation, and worked as a nurse. She was a supporter of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, she moved to Mississippi to support public school desegregation. Derian helped organize the Loyalist Democrats (not to be confused with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party) 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. She 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. During the 1976 U.S. presidential election, Derian was deputy director of the Carter-Mondale campaign. After Jimmy Carter won that election, he nominated Derian to be Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. President Carter, however, had the post elevated to that of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs effective August 17, 1977, and Derian served in that capacity for the remainder of the Carter administration. In this post and as head of the new Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the United States Department of State, she worked to improve policy coordination on humanitarian issues such as human rights, refugees, and prisoners of war. In 1978, Derian married Hodding Carter III, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. 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. Besides her husband Hodding Carter III, Ms. Derian is also survived by two sons, Michael and Craig, and a daughter, Brooke Derian, from her first marriage; three stepdaughters, Catherine Sullivan, Finn Carter and Margaret Joseph; a stepson, Hodding Carter IV; a sister, Michael Perkins; two grandchildren; and 10 step-grandchildren.