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Penelope “Penny”  Ransdell Patch (born December 12, 1943) is the first white woman to work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on a field project in the Deep South. Not only did she work heavily with the SNCC she also helps deliver children (midwife-nurse) in rural communities and she continues her racial justice work not only within her community but other communities in need of help.

Early Life
Penny Patch was born on December 12, 1943, and spent the first two years of her life living with her mother and grandparents in New York City. Her mother and her father met at a Russian Language graduate program at Harvard University, where her other was first in the class. Penny grew up constantly surrounded by politics, whether it was her mother and her work in politics and civic life or her father and his left-leaning political views (which soon started to drift to the right). After living in NYC for two years, she soon moved to Dairen, Manchuria, which is a port city on the northeastern coast of China to be with her father for his foreign service position. Most of her childhood was surrounded by rubble caused by the aftermath of World War II. She attended college at Swarthmore College in 1961, a college that had Quaker principles allowed her to immediately join SPAC (Swarthmore Progressive Action Coalition) which gave her a space where she could put into action her beliefs and ideals.

Civil Rights Activism and SNCC
While attending a protest at her college (Swarthmore College), she asked SNCC organizers Reggie Robinson and Dion Diamond, but they first rejected her stating they were mainly looking for black students. A few months after they originally declined her, she received a call from Charles Sherrod who was working as an SNCC field project Organizer. The field project was based out of Albany, Georgia; Sherrod was looking to make the field project integrated. They went to Georgia to work with and develop local black leaders of organizations and churches to encourage voter registration. In the early summer of 1962, Penny Patch officially joined the SNCC and became the first white woman to work on a field project and travel to Georgia. Because Patch was eighteen at the time, she did not have to tell her parents that she joined or that she left for the field project. Because Georgia was the first field project that Patch has been on, she had much to learn. One of the main jobs that Patch had was writing, typing, and distributing flyers for mass meetings. She often canvassed the black communities with Margaret Sanders who was a sixteen-year-old high school student to urge them to attend the meetings and register to vote. While working for the SNCC, there were many times that Penny was either arrested or threatened. The first time she was arrested was because she was trespassing on private property in March of 1962. During the summer of 1963, Penny spent eleven days in the Albany city jail while on a hunger strike. The cells were very small, poorly kept, and segregated. Because they were segregated, for the first couple of her arrests, Penny was alone in her cell. Not only did she have to worry about her wellbeing in jail, while on the hunger strike, Chief Laurie Pritchett would frequently visit their cells taunting them with food, fully knowing that they were on an eleven day hunger strike, he used. There were many times when Penny would go to dinner or drive with an integrated group, which often caused loads of stress due to the fact that they could easily get arrested if the police wanted. There were constant thoughts of “were the police being called?” or “Were we going to be hijacked as we left town?”. Even though they were in a constant state of anxiety, they still ordered their food, ate their food, paid, and then left. There were no mobs or groups of white men waiting for them to leave.

Mississippi Movement and Panola County
Soon after her work for the SNCC slowed down, Penny went to work in the Jackson, Mississippi, Council of Federated Organizations office (COFO) in 1964. While she worked there, Penny sorted through hundreds of applications of individuals who were both Black and White who wanted to join the SNCC. There were often times where Penny did not feel welcome in Mississippi, she never experienced any hostility, but she did not have the same connection with them as she did with the people in Albany, Georgia. During her time in Mississippi, three men had gone missing; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. While her and her colleagues were calling local police, FBI, and putting out statements, she felt tremendous guilt because she was the one who accepted Andrew Goodman into the project. All three bodies were found in August of 1964 buried beneath the ground, but the murderers were never charged. In March of 1965, the house that Penny was residing in was shot at multiple times. They missed all of the members of the Miles family and Penny, but after this experience they still lived in fear. She was scared, exhausted, and anxious. Penny felt that her time with the SNCC was slowly disappearing, she did not have the same connection she originally did when she first joined.

Later in Life
Penny sent in her resignation to the SNCC office in Atlanta in April of 1965. She states that she kept the letter short and simple because it hurt to be leaving an organization that she quickly fell in love with. She still stayed active within the civil rights movement, because she knew she had to use her voice. However, it was hard to feel connected to the world outside of the movement, as it became very easy to feel isolated from a world that they do not fit into. From 1965 to 1967, Patch lived in Berkeley, California where she tried to work in the antiwar movement but soon moved to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1967, Patch moved to Vermont with Chris Williams (whom she later married and had a son with) where they purchased land with some of their friends in Northeast Vermont which was considered the poorest part of the state. Soon after the couple married, they divorced in 1970, however in 1973, she moved in with her now husband David Martin and son Seth. During the early 1970s was when Penny became interested in helping local communities with birthing children. She spent many years working as a public health nurse with the pregnant women and young children in her community.