Lillie Patterson
*Lillie Patterson was born on May 3, 1917. She was a Black writer and school and college librarian.
Lillie Griselda Patterson was from South Carolina. She grew up listening to her grandmother telling stories in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Patterson received a bachelor's degree in elementary education from Hampton University in the 1940s and a graduate degree in library services from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s. She also studied at Johns Hopkins University and New York University.
Patterson was a librarian at Baltimore Public Schools and Morgan State University. She wrote 17 books for children and young adults, including Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace, the Statue of Liberty, Coretta Scott King, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. In 1963 she received the Living Maker of Negro History Award from the Iota Phi Lambda sorority.
Patterson was the first author to be given the Coretta Scott King Award in 1970. She also won a Professional Award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs in Baltimore and the Helen Keating Award in 1985 from the Church and Synagogue Library Association.
Lillie Patterson died on March 11, 1999.
