Freedom Rider recounts activism
PALM BEACH GARDENS — A Southern woman whose role in the civil rights movement landed her on the Ku Klux Klan’s most-wanted list before she graduated college spoke to students Wednesday at The Weiss School.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, who is white, was a student at Tougaloo College, a small, historically black college in Mississippi, when she joined in sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson. She and thousands of other college students across the country had been training in nonviolent protests to end segregation.
“It was like wildfire,” she said. Opponents burned the lunch-counter protesters with cigarettes, doused them with ketchup and poured a mix of pepper and water into their eyes. At one point, Mulholland doubted any of them would make it out alive.
“But we did,” she said, remembering police who stood outside laughing during the May 28, 1963 protest.
That was after she spent months in a cramped cell in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Partman for her participation in the Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides were intended to end the segregation of all public transportation by filling the jails. Hundreds of black and white Americans traveled together on buses and trains through the Deep South to challenge Jim Crow laws.
Mulholland, who grew up in Arlington, Va., said she realized at a young age that segregation was wrong — although it was the norm in the South at the time. She remembers exploring around the mill towns of Lake Oconee, Ga., with her friend one summer and seeing the one-room shack where black children went to school, compared to the fancy, brick school built for white children after World War II.
“I believed it was wrong, partly because of what I could see with my own eyes,” she said. “It was not fair.”
She went to Sunday School and memorized verses such “Love your neighbor as yourself ” and saw the hypocrisy, she said.
She said it was her faith that motivated her to get involved in the civil rights movement rather than stay a bystander.
“I took my religion seriously,” she said. “Jesus got nailed to the cross. They might kill me, but I wouldn’t be the first one.”
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., gave Mulholland its Freedom Award in 2015. The museum is at the former Lorraine Motel where civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
When a student asked if she sees any similarities today to what she witnessed in the 1960s, she said President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban affecting many countries, particularly those with Muslim-majority populations, is the closest the United States has come.
“It’s not an exact parallel or duplicate, but I do think it’s similar,” she said.
A parent asked her opinion about riots this summer surrounding the removal of Confederate monuments. She said she never approves of rioting, which wasn’t part of the organized protests.
She has “very mixed feelings” about taking down monuments. They should be moved to Civil War cemeteries or museums, she said.