Patt Derian passed away early Friday morning at her home in Chapel Hill with family by her side.

Derian served as the deputy director of the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign in 1976. After Carter won that election, Derian served in his administration as the assistant secretary of state for Human Right and Humanitarian Affairs.

Derian married Hodding Carter in 1978, who was assistant secretary of state for Public Affairs in the Carter administration. The couple came to Chapel Hill as Carter was most recently university professor at the UNC School of Leadership and Policy.

President Barack Obama spoke of work done Derian while he was traveling to Argentina in late March to visit a memorial honoring the victims of that country’s military dictatorship.

A March article posted in The Nation described Derian as “the wonderfully feisty activist and Mississippi civil-rights hero.”

Derian was 86.

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