In March, I traveled to Lehigh University to participate in a panel and dialogue called a “Revolutionary Sister Tea” along with co-panelists and activists Ericka Huggins, Sonya Sanchez and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. The panel also included black and Latina scholars Johanna Fernandez, Duchess Harris, and Robyn Spencer.
It was the first time I had ever met Joan Mulholland, though I knew her history. When I returned from the event, I talked about it with students and they all were surprised to find out that Ms. Mulholland is white.
When many young people hear “civil rights activist,” they think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. An image of a white person does not automatically come to mind.
Her unlikely story is told in the documentary film An Ordinary Hero: The True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland.
About the film:
“An Ordinary Hero” is the amazing true story of one woman’s courage to help change the world. By the time she was 19 years old, legendary civil rights activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland participated in over three dozen sit-ins and protests she was put on death row in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary with other Freedom Riders. She was involved in one of the most famous and violent sit-ins of the Movement at the Jackson Woolworth lunch counter and helped plan and organize the March on Washington.
For her actions she was disowned by her family, attacked, shot at, cursed at, and hunted down by the Klan for execution. Her path has crossed with some of the biggest names in the Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Robert F. Kennedy, John Lewis, Diane Nash, John Salter, and Harry Belafonte, to name a few. In addition, she has met such luminaries of that period like Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Marlon Brando, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson.
The film’s writer and director is her son, Loki Mulholland.
This National Press Club review gives more detail on her background and story.
Who is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland and why is her story so important?
Against the will of her family and the wishes of those in power, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland gives us a beautiful example of personal courage, commitment and drive to raise awareness about generations of social injustice. As a privileged white teenager, her future looked safe and sound, but it was her choices that landed her face to face with the KKK and violent mobs. She spent months in prison during the Freedom Rides, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the great moral heroes of the civil rights movement. Raised in the American South, Joan was well aware of racial bigotry and segregation. She describes her mother as a “stereotypical Georgia redneck” who held strongly to the beliefs of white racial superiority. Her privileged father came from Iowa and held less demeaning views, but neither of her parents would be prepared for what would take place between 1960 and 1964.
Exposed to the conflicting values of segregation and the moral virtues written in the bible, by her youth pastor, her life changed when a group of African American youths were invited to speak about their justification and efforts to end segregation. Joan not only realized the truth about social injustice but that she as a white southern girl had inherent power to bring awareness to the inequalities.
“Segregation was unfair. It was wrong, morally, religiously. As a Southerner — a white Southerner — I felt that we should do what we could to make the South better and to rid ourselves of this evil.”
Though she wasn’t fully aware of all the danger she would face, Joan was given an opportunity to join the front lines of the movement as 19 year-old student attending Duke University. Durham North Carolina, home of Duke University, was about to become the second city in the nation to have sit-ins openly protesting the color barrier. Joan eagerly joined in. When the Dean of Women at Duke pressured Joan to stop her activism she dropped out and devoted herself even more to the activism efforts, the sit-ins, pickets, demonstrations and the upcoming Freedom Rides. In early June 1961, after the first Freedom Ride ended with a firebombed bus, Joan jumped on a flight down to Mississippi to join her friends. As she and others poured in from around the country to continue the Freedom Rides until they were arrested, fined $200 and sent to prison for two months.
“The idea was to challenge segregation in all interstate transportation, not just buses, and to get media attention.”
In disbelief that a young white woman would be risking her safety on the behalf of others, the prison’s superintendent sent a letter to Joan’s parents, chiding “What I cannot understand is why as a mother you permitted a minor white girl to gang up with a bunch of negro bucks and white hoodlums to ramble over this country with the express purpose of violating the laws of certain states and attempting to incite acts of violence.”
Joan served her two month imprisonment without bail and stayed in a month longer to reduce her fine by $3.00 for each additional day she remained. She was able to pay the remainder of her fine at the same time that Charlayne Hunter and Hamiton Holmes became the first African American students to enroll at the University of Georgia. Joan thought “Now 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?” Inspired by Charlayne’s strength by intentionally enrolling in an all-white university, Joan decided to do likewise and enroll in an all black school. Joan believed that “integration shouldn’t be a one-way street: Whites had to make the journey, too.” The historically black Tougaloo Southern Christian College in Mississippi reasoned that their school’s charter was older than the Jim Crow laws and daringly decided to accept her.
For the young people in your life, this children’s book is an excellent choice as a gift that will expand their knowledge of civil rights activism.
She Stood For Freedom: The Untold Story of a Civil Rights Hero, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a little girl in the 1950s. When she saw that black people were being treated differently than white people, she promised herself that she would do something to change that. As a teenager, she joined the Civil Rights Movement and protested the injustice she saw around her.
During the 1960s, Joan attended many demonstrations and sit-ins, she protested at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, and she participated in several organized marches, including the March on Washington, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Though she was threatened, arrested, and mocked, she held true to her promise to make the world a better place for everyone. “Anyone can make a difference,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how old or young you are. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember, you don’t have to change the world . . . just change your world.”
Thanks to the Library of Congress Civil Rights History Project there is a wealth of material on the movement available online, like this absorbing interview with Mulholland conducted by historian John Dittmer in Arlington, Virginia, in 2013.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland shares how, as a child in Arlington, Virginia, her awareness of racial disparities grew. As a student at Duke University, she began participating in the sit-in movement. She soon moved to Washington, D.C. and joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), which led her to participate in the Freedom Rides of 1961. She describes in detail serving time at Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm) with other civil rights activists. Mulholland also discusses attending Tougaloo College and her involvement in the Jackson sit-in movement.
A transcript is available for download at the Civil Rights Project website. Carve out some time to give this interview a listen!
In the audience at the panel discussion I attended at Lehigh, a group of young black women were beaming at Joan, and they rushed to greet her after it was over, whooping, hugging, and throwing hand signs. They were members of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority—and Joan is their sister soror.
I stood off to the side, grinning. Though not a member, my mom was, which I wrote about here. Not a lot of people outside of the black community recognize the importance of black sororities and fraternities as key social and political networks. The roster of the Deltas includes many historic names you will recognize including Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Height, and many contemporary black women in politics like Marcia Fudge and Loretta Lynch. This Atlantic piece, titled “The Political Power of the Black Sorority," gives a good overview.
I talked about it with Joan, who smiled and said, "When I was at Tougaloo, if you wanted to be in the middle of political activism, all you had to do was go to where Deltas were gathered.”
Several news articles have covered Joan’s integration of the Deltas, including "The Story Of How The First White Member Of Delta Sigma Theta Was A Segregationist’s Worst Nightmare” and "Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, First White initiated into Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc."
Joan also broke color barriers by being the First WHITE woman to get initiated into the prestigious largest African American Greek Sorority, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. It was Gamma Psi Chapter at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. She will be greeted by members of the Collier County Alumnae Chapter and the Collier County Community. “Inspired by Charlayne Hunter’s (her soror) strength by intentionally enrolling in an all-white university, Joan decided to do likewise and enroll in an all black college. She believed that “integration shouldn’t be a one-way street: Whites had to make the journey, too”. It was at Tougaloo Southern Christian College in Mississippi that she found her first love…Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about white allies in the struggle against racism and white supremacy, which becomes more and more important in the here and now of Trumpism. We need historical role models to teach our kids about (like Albion W. Tourgée, who I wrote about last Sunday), but we also need powerful examples in the here and now.
For me, this quote from Mulholland says it all: “I saw something was wrong, and decided to do something about it.”
Thank you Joan Trumpauer Mulholland for all that you have done and continue to do to move us forward—together.