Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Joan Trum pauer Mul holland might seem like an unlikely, civil rights hero: a white teenage girl, with a conservative upbringing, in Arlington, Virginia, during the Jim Crow era of segregation. But by the time she was, 19 years old, she had participated, in over three dozen sit-ins and protests. in the South, against the treatment of black Americans, earning her a place, on the Ku Klux Klan’s K K K. most-wanted list. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, born September 14, 1941 in WashingtonDC, is an American civil rights activist and a Freedom Rider from Arlington, Virginia. This inspiring historian was the first white to integrate Tougaloo College in Jackson Mississippi, and to be a part of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Joining Freedom Rides, and being held on death row in Parchman Penitentiary for her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement, Ms. Mulholland risked her relationship with her wealthy family, her education at Duke University and placed her life in jeopardy in order to help create the change she wanted to see in the United States. Ms. Mulholland faced threats and was hunted down by the KKK during Freedom Summer. Ms. Mulholland is now a retired teacher after teaching English as a second language for 40 years. Ms. Mulholland has started a foundation known as the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland foundation​. The foundation’s goal is to educate the youth about the civil rights movement and to help teach youth how to become activists in their own communities. At her parents’ insistence, she attended Duke University in North Carolina, where she participated in nonviolent sit-ins at lunch counters to protest stores’ policies that forbade blacks sitting with whites. She left Duke to go to Tougaloo College in Mississippi, becoming the first white student to enroll at the historically black institution. At Tougaloo she met civil rights leaders with whom she would work in the coming years, such as King, Anne Moody and Medgar Evers (who was assassinated by a segregationist in 1963). She spent the summer of 1963 helping plan the March on Washington, which would turn out to be among the largest political rallies in the nation’s history, during which Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Her involvement with social justice started in church and continued in secondary school. Her youth church group secretly invited black students to their Sunday spaghetti dinner. “This was late 1957. We had to keep it quiet because the police could arrest us under the public assembly law,” Mulholland said. “The American Nazi party was about two blocks away, and they could show up. But we met and broke bread together against all the laws.” When Mullholland graduated from Tougaloo, she returned to Arlington, Virginia, where she raised five sons and worked as a teacher. Her life is chronicled in the film An Ordinary Hero. Today, Mulholland, now 75, speaks to schools and community groups about her experience, including working with Martin Luther King Jr. and spending two months in a Mississippi prison with other “Freedom Riders” for their 1961 bus trip through the American South protesting segregation. “Get out there and take some form of action,” Mulholland advises young people. “Support anybody who’s being bullied.”