Martha Bob Lucas Pate (November 27, 1912 – May 16, 1983) was a Kentucky-born administrator of colleges and organizations dedicated to international affairs, education, humanitarian aid, and religion.
[4] Her years abroad and the friendships she made there significantly influenced her devotion to global issues for the rest of her life.
Westhampton was dedicated to the education of women, as was Sweet Briar College where Lucas would continue her administrative career.
[12] She also brought speakers and professors from across the country and world to campus, assumed leadership of the Junior Year Abroad program from the University of Delaware and emphasized the importance of educating women for global citizenship.
We must acquire a sympathetic understanding of the values and aspirations which determine the thinking and acting of human beings in the vast areas of eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands of the many seas.
[14]While president of Sweet Briar College, Lucas also oversaw the establishment of the Lyman Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion series in 1948, and a long-sought Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1949.
[16] Lucas represented the United States at the Universities Preparatory Conference of 1948 held by UNESCO in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
George V. Allen, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, headed the delegation, which also included: Milton S. Eisenhower, Luther H. Evans, and Reinhold Niebuhr.
[14] On October 6, 1949, Sweet Briar College issued a press release announcing President Lucas' resignation.
"[4] Remarks Lucas made at Goucher College during her 1948 inauguration speech for that institution's incoming president Dr. Otto Kraushaar expressed her distaste for segregation: Basically, we can work with all our hearts and minds toward an affirmation, in keeping with recent proclamations by UNESCO and the United Nations, of the human rights and fundamental freedoms for all the people of the world, even for our own compatriots and neighbors who may differ from us in religion or in race.
[20] Eleven years later, long after Lucas' resignation and shortly after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and over opposition of Virginia's attorney general, Sweet Briar College integrated.
After leaving Sweet Briar College, Lucas spent ten years traveling extensively and writing.
Throughout the 1960s Lucas served as a chair, trustee, or board member of many recognizable organizations such as the New York Medical College, Reading for the Blind, the National Scholastic Awards, the Columbia School of Social Work, the Fund for Peace, the Fund for Theological Education, the Richmond, Virginia YWCA, and Goucher College.
[8] In the 1970s she continued serving in roles as committee member, regent, board member or trustee for an even larger number of organizations which included the Dana Fellowship Committee, the National Commission on U.S. - China Relations, UNICEF, Georgetown University, the New York School of Psychiatry, the Ralph Bunch Memorial Project, the Institute for Study of World Politics, the Center for the Deaf, and for Global Perspectives in Education.
[8] In an article she wrote for the Sweet Briar College Alumnae Magazine in 1977, Lucas described her strategy for finding opportunities to serve the common good.
When I resigned from Sweet Briar, I expressed my conviction that it is imperative at this crucial time in the world's history that each individual put himself in a position to make what he feels will be his most useful contribution to the needs of society, to the survival of thoughtful, ethical life on our planet.
Particularly in my own fields of philosophy and comparative religion, and as an ethicist and Internationalist, I felt a 'categorical imperative' to think, speak and act according to my moral insights, free of institutional restraints.
[27] The Lynchburg Daily Advance called Lucas "a tall, striking young woman with short brown hair and intelligent eyes," when she arrived on the campus of Sweet Briar College in 1946.
[28] That same year former colleagues at Westhampton were quoted as saying that she was "a very attractive and magnetic woman, with an able mind, a great spirit, and a quality for leadership.
"[29] On Tuesday, October 31, 1961, Martha B. Lucas married Maurice Pate at Riverside Church in New York City.
[1] Her 100-acre estate in Redding, Connecticut became the Do Ngak Kunphen Ling Tibetan Buddhist Center for Universal Peace in 2006.