Joan Trumpauer Mulholland facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland
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Mulholland in 2013
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Joan Trumpauer
September 14, 1941 Washington, D.C., U.S.
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| Known for | Freedom Riders |
| Children | 5 |
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (born September 14, 1941) is an American civil rights activist. She became famous for her bravery during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She was one of the Freedom Riders, a group of people who challenged unfair segregation laws.
In 1961, she was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for her activism. She spent two months in the Maximum Security Unit of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The next year, she became the first white student to enroll at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Mississippi. She also worked as a secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
After her time as an activist, she worked as a teacher. Now retired, she started the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation. The foundation teaches young people about the Civil Rights Movement. It helps them learn how to make a positive change in their own communities.
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Early Life and Beliefs
Joan Mulholland was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. Her family history was complicated. Her great-grandparents in Georgia had owned slaves. After the United States Civil War, they became sharecroppers.
Joan went to a Presbyterian church. The lessons she learned there taught her to treat everyone with kindness and respect. She learned verses like, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." These teachings were very different from the segregation she saw all around her. Segregation was the unfair system of keeping black and white people separate.
A Life-Changing Moment
When Joan was a young girl, she visited family in Georgia. She and a friend decided to walk into the part of town where African Americans lived. This was on the other side of the train tracks.
The experience changed her forever. She said, "No one said anything to me, but the way they shrunk back and became invisible, showed me that they believed that they weren't as good as me." At age 10, she saw how unfair life was for African Americans. She promised herself that she would help change the world.
This desire to fight for equality caused problems with her mother. Her mother wanted her to go to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Joan went to Duke for a year but felt she needed to do more to help people. She left college and began working with a student group from Howard University that practiced nonviolent protest.
Fighting for Civil Rights
In the spring of 1960, Mulholland took part in her first sit-in. A sit-in is a protest where people sit down in a place and refuse to leave. They were protesting at places that only served white people. Because she was a white woman from the South helping the movement, some people did not understand her.
After her first arrest, she was even tested to see if she was mentally ill. She learned to hide paper in her skirt to write a diary in jail. In her diary, she wrote about what they ate and how they sang songs to keep their spirits up.
The leaders at Duke University did not support her activism. The Dean of Women pressured her to stop. Because of this, she decided to leave the university.
The Freedom Riders and Prison
In the summer of 1961, a group of black and white activists called the Freedom Riders challenged segregation on buses. They rode together from Washington, D.C., toward New Orleans. In Anniston, Alabama, their buses were attacked and set on fire.
Many thought the Freedom Rides would end after this violence. But activists like Diane Nash and Mulholland were called to continue the journey. Mulholland joined a new group of riders. They flew to New Orleans and then took a train to Jackson, Mississippi.
When they arrived in Jackson, the Freedom Riders were arrested for refusing to leave a "whites-only" waiting area. Mulholland was 19 years old. She and the others were sent to the dangerous Parchman Penitentiary. She refused to pay bail to be released.
The women were given rough prison clothes. They were held on death row for two months to keep them away from other prisoners. "We were in a segregated cell with 17 women and 3 square feet of floor space for each of us," she later said. Mulholland served her two-month sentence. She also stayed longer to work off the $200 fine she was given.
Studying at Tougaloo College
After leaving prison, Mulholland wanted to make another strong statement against segregation. She thought, "If whites were going to riot when black students were going to white schools, what were they going to do if a white student went to a black school?"
She enrolled at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in Jackson. There, she met famous civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr.. She even became a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a historically African American sorority.
Her choice was not popular with everyone. People sent her threatening letters. Her parents were worried and tried to get her to leave by offering her a trip to Europe. She went on the trip but returned to Tougaloo right after.
The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In
On May 28, 1963, Mulholland took part in a famous sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Jackson. She sat with other activists, including her classmate Anne Moody and professor John Salter.
The protesters were attacked by an angry white mob. They were yelled at, and people poured ketchup and mustard on them. Mulholland and Moody were dragged from their seats by their hair. Despite the violence, they returned to the counter. The protest was a key moment in the Jackson civil rights movement. It showed the bravery of the activists and the ugly reality of racism.
March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, Mulholland traveled to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This was the event where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. She went with Anne Moody and another activist, Ed King. The march was a powerful call for equality and justice for all Americans.
A few days after the march, tragedy struck. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosion killed four young girls. Mulholland took a piece of glass from the explosion and made a necklace from it. She carried another piece in her wallet for years as a reminder of the fight for justice.
Later Life and Legacy
After her time as a full-time activist, Joan Mulholland worked for the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. government. She later became a teacher, teaching English to students who spoke other languages.
Today, Joan Mulholland is retired and lives in Virginia. She has five sons. Her family did not support her activism at first, but she continued to fight for what she believed in.
Her story is featured in the PBS documentary Freedom Riders. In 2011, she joined other original riders to retrace the route they took 50 years earlier. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland's life shows how one person's courage can help change history.
