Katie Booth (scientist)

Katie Booth (née Patterson, May 23, 1907 – August 26, 2005) was an American biomedical chemist and civil rights activist.

Booth was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1907. Her parents were Joseph Patterson and Ida Coffye. She attended school up to the eighth grade in one room at her church, then attended the 33rd Street High School in Gulfport. In 1929, she was a member of the first class of students to graduate from the Gulfport School for Coloreds. After graduating, she moved to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, to work for the Presbyterian Board of Education.

During World War II, Booth married, and her husband died from his war injuries eight years after the conflict ended. After the war, she studied towards a degree in chemistry at the Damen Institute of Technology, before working at the Department of Pharmacology at the Chicago Medical School, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, where she specialised in preventative health measure, prenatal care, and also worked on treatments for sickle cell anemia.

Booth was also involved in the civil rights movement and participated in voter registration work in Chicago, Illinois’ West Side neighborhoods. In the 1980s, she helped with a registration drive that led to the election of the first black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington.

She remained civically engaged until her nineties, working to expand the children's activities available at the Magnolia Grove Community Center in her hometown of Gulfport. It was renamed the Katie Patterson Booth Community Center in 2003.

Booth was interviewed by Larry Crowe of the The HistoryMakers on November 13, 2002.

She died in 2005, aged 98.