Joan Trumpauer Mulholland says the fight that shaped her youth isn’t over
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a Freedom Rider who slept on floorboards and relied on friends to drive her between cities to hide her from the Ku Klux Klan.
A white woman from Virginia, she was arrested repeatedly for joining Black activists in lunch counter sit-ins. She spent two months housed in the death row unit in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison.
That’s when she said she started drinking coffee.
More than six decades later, Mulholland says the fight that shaped her youth isn’t over.
“We’re moving backward, from the top on,” she said Sunday in Atlanta.
Appearing alongside former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young at the inaugural HBCU Micro-Scholarship Unity Gathering, Trumpauer Mulholland challenged younger generations to stop hesitating and act.
“I just don’t see folks out there doing a whole lot,” she said. “Talking, maybe. But not direct action.”
The two civil rights veterans met at the Gathering Spot to pass along lessons from their activism, reflect on the role HBCUs and college students played in the Civil Rights Movement, and challenge a new generation to continue work they say remains unfinished.
Trumpauer Mulholland said HBCUs and Black Greek-lettered organizations were “the power behind the throne” in social activism.
“The Civil Rights Movement came out of that in the ’60s, and it was the college students who would get together and go have the demonstrations and arrange for conversations with the power structure,” she said.
Trumpauer Mulholland’s route to the Civil Rights Movement started in Sunday school, where she was taught lessons about love and equal treatment.
Then, while visiting her mother’s family in Oconee County, she didn’t understand the racial disparities she saw between Black and white public schools.
While attending Duke University, Trumpauer Mulholland was arrested for participating in the Durham sit-ins and taken for a psychological evaluation.
She later dropped out after the university’s dean of women pressured her to end her civil rights activism.
Trumpauer Mulholland eventually enrolled at Tougaloo College, a historically Black institution in Mississippi, where she continued organizing.
She became Tougaloo’s first white full-time student and later the first white member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.
Young is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
The Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation, which was founded in 2022 and named in her honor, provides micro-scholarships to HBCU students.
The $250 micro-scholarships help HBCU students cover expenses such as groceries, gas, books and off-campus housing. Students need only be enrolled at an HBCU to apply — no essay is required. Recipients are selected by lottery, with 200 students receiving scholarships each semester.
Lauryn Wilson, the foundation’s chief brand ambassador and a senior agricultural business major at Florida A&M University, was honored Sunday with the Chief HBCU Ambassador Award. She works with student ambassadors across HBCU campuses to encourage their classmates to apply for the micro-scholarships.
Though Wilson never applied for one herself, she joined the foundation to help other students facing financial challenges.
“I know exactly how it feels to not have as much funding toward college,” said Wilson, a Chicago native.
The gathering also honored investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell with its Impact Award and Rutha Harris, an original member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, with its Icon Award.
Young urged activists to think strategically, including finding ways to work with people they considered opponents.
He recalled visiting his mentors, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, after they were jailed in Albany. During those visits, Young said, he built relationships with law enforcement officers by treating them with respect.
“If you treat (people) all like the children of God, pretty soon they’ll start acting that way,” Young said.
“Everybody needs to grow, and everybody needs to get a chance.”
Trumpauer Mulholland offered younger activists a more pointed lesson.
“Fear will get you killed,” she said, a cup of coffee in hand. “It keeps you from thinking.”
For Loki Mulholland, founder and CEO of the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation and the activist’s son, bringing the two civil rights veterans together was an opportunity for a younger generation to “sit at the feet of history.”
But listening to that history, he said, is only the beginning.
“As my mother once said, ‘History isn’t finished. It’s waiting for you,’” Mulholland said. “We just have to make the choice to do something about it.”
“This is that opportunity.”