YOUNGSTOWN — Joan Trumpauer Mulholland vividly recalled a day when she was about 10 years old and she and a white friend named Mary walked into an area of black residents on a rural dirt road along railroad tracks in Georgia and was surprised by the response — or lack thereof.
“We were along the colored road — that was the polite way of saying it back then — and the folks made themselves scarce when they saw two white girls,” Mulholland, 82, of Arlington, Virginia, said.
She also recalled having seen a small one-room schoolhouse for blacks and soon found herself making a mental comparison — one that would change her life.
The decrepit school for blacks had no glass or screens covering the windows and lacked running water and electricity. By contrast, the white school had the latest amenities, she recalled.
“I knew this was wrong and contrary to what I had been taught in Sunday school,” Mulholland said, adding that such a glaring disparity provided her with a strong incentive to do her part to change an unjust system in which most blacks were treated as second-class citizens.
That experience was among the memories the civil rights icon and social activist shared during a presentation she gave Wednesday evening at the YWCA of Youngstown, 25 W. Rayen Ave., downtown.
Accompanying Mulholland was her son, Loki Mulholland of Richmond, Virginia, who held a screening Tuesday at the Tyler History Center to show his latest documentary, “Dying to Vote.”
Joan Mulholland was attending Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, during the famous February 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. She attended a few meetings and was informed that sit-in participants were coming to the university, but was told to keep it secret because of possible sanctions and recriminations.
By the time she was in her early 20s, Joan Mulholland had taken part in more than 50 sit-ins and other civil rights demonstrations.
Nevertheless, Joan Mulholland’s activism created a rift between her and her mother, who was a racist white southern woman — so much so that Mulholland’s mother dissuaded her from attending a church university in Ohio because it might be integrated. Consequently, she enrolled at Duke, where she studied for about a year before dropping out.
As a young student, her activism was not well understood, so she was dismissed as mentally ill and tested after her first arrest.
Joan Mulholland also recalled having gone to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where additional sit-ins were being planned. While there, she became part of the Nonviolent Action Group, and took part in a peaceful demonstration at a lunch counter in Arlington, which ended rather quickly because the employees feared being arrested for serving blacks, she recalled.
Also during his mother’s talk Wednesday, Loki Mulholland conducted a question-and-answer exchange with her in which he also showed clips of his documentary “An Ordinary Hero” that chronicles her civil rights actions.
She discussed having participated in the May 1961 Freedom Rides that began in Washington with 13 participants headed through the South for New Orleans. The Congress of Racial Equality, a major civil rights organization, spearheaded the integrated rides to test the efficacy of the landmark 1960 Boynton v. Virginia U.S. Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 should be construed to ban all types of segregation in public transportation.
Mulholland joined the rides after a bus had been stopped and set on fire in Anniston, Alabama, and other riders were beaten on Mother’s Day 1961 an hour away in Birmingham. Mulholland, along with Stokely Carmichael, Hank Thomas and other activists, flew to New Orleans, then boarded a train for Jackson, Mississippi, with members of CORE.
She and others were arrested and taken to the Hinds County jail for refusing to leave a waiting area. After that, Mulholland and other riders were transported to Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta, which had a longtime reputation for violence.
For about two months, she and many of her fellow riders were housed on the prison’s death row to frighten and intimidate them, she said.
Soon after her release, Mulholland enrolled at Tougaloo College near Jackson, where, a few years later, she became the first white woman accepted into the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
While at Tougaloo, she and the late Dorie Ladner, a civil rights activist and social worker who died last month at age 81, were asked to escort Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was on the campus to give a speech in the science building. While she thought highly of King, others felt “he wasn’t doing enough direct action,” she said.
Also during her presentation, the civil rights activist and former English as a second language teacher discussed having been in charge of dealing with the media during the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In addition, she shared her feelings about the tragic bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a few weeks later, as well as the June 21, 1964, killing of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner in Mississippi.
“It was truly the saddest day” of the civil rights movement, Mulholland said about the bombing that killed four girls and injured 21 others.
Mulholland and her son also implored attendees Wednesday to not only vote in all elections but to encourage others to register and get to the polls.
She also told her audience that “I don’t do fear,” and added that it’s important to die for something one believes in.
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