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Good Morning POU! A white woman that participated in the Freedom Rides, went to Tougaloo College, pledged Delta and was sent to Parchman Prison to serve time – whatta life!
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (born September 14, 1941) is an American civil rights activist who was active in the 1960s. She was one of the Freedom Riders who was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961, and was confined for two months in the Maximum Security Unit of the Mississippi State Penitentiary (known as “Parchman Farm”). The following year she was the first white student to enroll at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi and served as the local secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
She initially attended Duke University which had separate campuses for men and women. In the first and second week of school, women rushed and pledged for sororities. Mulholland and her roommate were uninterested and went to a different event held by the International Club, instead. This behavior was unusual for Duke and the university sent a counselor to visit the girls to see if they were unhappy.
In the spring of 1960, Mulholland participated in her first of many sit-ins. Her civil rights activism was not understood, being a white, southern woman. She was branded as mentally ill and was taken in for testing after her first arrest. Out of fear of shakedowns, Mulholland wore a skirt with a deep, ruffled hem where she would hide paper that she had crumpled until it was soft and then folded neatly. With the paper, Mulholland was able to write a diary about her experiences that still exists. In this diary, she explains what they were given to eat and how they sang almost all night long. She even mentioned the segregation in the jail cells and stated, “I think all the girls in here are gems, but I feel more in common with the Negro girls & wish I was locked in with them instead of these atheist Yankees.”
She has stated she got a lot of support from the faculty at Duke University, but not from the administration. She dropped out of university in the fall, after being pressured by the Dean of Women to stop her activism.
Mulholland attended Duke University for a year before she decided to drop out, in search for a greater meaning in her life. Having nowhere to go, she obtained menial jobs while putting efforts towards the Nonviolent Action Group from Howard University.
Mulholland joined the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. After the new group of Freedom Riders were arrested for refusing to leave a bus waiting area in Jackson, Mulholland and others were put inside a paddy wagon and taken to Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi, a jail in the Delta, not far from where Emmett Till had been murdered in 1955. This prison had a reputation for violence, and several inmates had disappeared. At the time, June 1961, Mulholland was 19, and she refused to pay bail.
When they got to Parchman, the women were issued coarse denim black-and-white striped skirts and t-shirts. Prior to being locked in cells, the women were stripped and each given a vaginal examination. The matron cleansed her gloved hand, prior to each exam, in a bucket of liquid that Mulholland said smelled like Lysol. In prison, Mulholland was segregated from her fellow Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) friends. She described the experience as isolating, with everyone unaware of what was going on.
They were housed on death row for two months. “We were in a segregated cell with 17 women and 3 square feet of floor space for each of us,” she recalled in 2014.
Soon after Mulholland’s release, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton E. Holmes became the first African-American students to enroll at the University of Georgia. One night an angry mob gathered outside Hunter’s dormitory, causing significant property damage and gaining media attention for the university and the state. After the riots, even previously pro-segregation officials condemned the rioters. Mulholland 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?” She then enrolled in Tougaloo College in Jackson, where she met Medgar Evers and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
When Dr. King came to Tougaloo College to give a speech, it was Mulholland who escorted him to the science building where he was to speak. Mulholland states that King was the hero of the movement, but many often got frustrated with him for preaching all of the time. Two years later, Mulholland was accepted into Delta Sigma Theta.
Today, Joan Mulholland is retired and lives in Virginia. She has five sons: Daniel (a.k.a. Bino), Django, Jomo, Geronimo, and Loki. Due to her actions as an activist participating in at least three dozen sit-ins, not only was she disowned by her family, but she was also hunted by the Klan for execution.
The Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation is dedicated to educating youth about the Civil Rights Movement and how to make a difference in their communities. The goal for the foundation is to provide learning materials for schools to educate the students on the part of American history that is often “misunderstood or skipped over”. Mulholland hopes to inform adolescents on how to spot racism and put an end to those racist ideologies.