Sarah Patton Boyle

Sarah-Lindsay Patton "Pattie" Boyle (May 9, 1906 – February 20, 1994) was an American author and civil rights activist from Virginia during the Civil Rights Movement. She is the author of The Desegregated Heart and various articles and books about race relations in Virginia and the South. Boyle was a "faculty wife" of drama professor, E. Roger Boyle, at the University of Virginia. Boyle was the first white person to serve on the board of directors for the Charlottesville NAACP chapter. Her father was an Episcopalian clergyman who was the director of the American Church Institute of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Her grandparents were veterans of the Civil War and had fought for the Confederate States. She wrote to him to welcome him to the university, thinking that she was one of many white people who agreed that segregation was wrong. Through her involvement with Swanson she eventually met T. J. Sellers, the editor of the black newspaper in Charlottesville, The Tribune.

Boyle died in Arlington, Virginia inside her home due to complications from Alzheimer's disease. She was buried near where she was born. After consulting other black ministers and editors, she found similar responses, which T. J. Sellers pointed out that she was paternalistic and condescending in tone. Boyle became part of the public attention in 1954 when she spoke at the Virginia General Assembly's Commission on Public Education where she advocated school integration. Instead of being afraid, Boyle was reported to laugh and called for her teen son to take a picture of the cross. The purpose of her article for the Post was to convince white Southerners that integration could be done amicably, however the way the article was received by white readers called to mind the idea of "interracial sex" because of the title and the picture of Boyle walking with two black male medical students. Boyle received hate mail and threatening phone calls in addition to the burning cross.

Boyle retired from her activism in 1967. A marker on the ACCORD Freedom Trail in St. Augustine, Florida notes her arrest at the Monson Motor Lodge in 1964; an event she was proud of.