Joan Trumpauer's parents both moved to Washington DC for government jobs during the depression, her father from Iowa and her mother from Georgia. Her great-grandparents had enslaved people in Georgia until after the Civil War when they became sharecroppers. 

Joan grew up in Arlington, Virginia "...but down-home was Georgia. That exposed me to a lot of the rural deep South, just going home to visit and hearing them express their attitudes and the religious [Pentecostal] fervor." 

In short, her mother was a racist. She'd tell Joan, "No matter how bad things are, at least ya aren't black."

But Joan also spent time with her paternal grandmother and learned her dad's family stories.

"My great grandmother was a suffragette and chained herself to the Iowa State Capital Building....My Iowa family cancelled out my Georgia family."

When it was time for Joan to go off to college in 1959, her mother insisted she attend segregated Duke University in North Carolina. That's where she first met student civil rights activists and talked with black people her own age. The next spring, she picketed segregated drugstores and participated in her first sit-in at Kress Five and Dime in Durham.

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland and unidentified man hold picket sign in North Carolina (1960).

Joan dropped out of Duke under pressure from the Women's Dean who tried to have her expelled from the school. She returned to the D.C. area to join the predominantly black Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), affiliated with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her Southern family disowned her.

She described that summer of 1960 as "basically it was this pretty long peaceful summer of picketing," including run-ins with the American Nazi Party while trying to integrate a small local amusement park in the era before Disney World.

The following spring the Movement ratcheted up the heat when thirteen Freedom Riders left DC on a bus tour of the South to test the Supreme Court ruling that integrated interstate travel.

Joan was 19-years-old when NAG got word of the bus had been bombed in Anniston, Alabama, May 14, 1961. The white supremacists hoped to stop the freedom riders, assaulting them as they fled the burning bus. But the campaign grew. Joan was one of a group led by Stokely Carmichael whichhopped on a plane to Louisiana, then a train to Jackson, Mississippi to put their bodies on the line.

Authorities arrested them when they exited the train onto the "white" platform.  Joane was marched to the paddy wagon with the rest of the group.

"[I]was looking like this sweet young thing, and the police officer just automatically reached out to help me down," Joan said later. "Now, he would not have done this if I were black. I know that." The officer said, 'We don’t want anything to happen to y’all.' And then, it was like he was struck by lightning, 'Oh, my God! What am I doing?' and jerked his hand back!"

Joan Trumpauer's mug shot taken at the Hind County Jail in Jackson, MS.

After an initial time in jail in Jackson, authorities transferred the activists to the Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary. One of the most notorious prisons in the country, it was an isolated cotton plantation near the area where Emmett Till was murdered.

The women did not suffer the brutal treatment they later learned the man had endured, but they were welcomed with vaginal searches by a female guard who first dipped her hand in Lysol.

“That was really intimidating. They showed they could do anything they wanted to us and probably would.”

"[At the county jail] you could scream bloody murder or you could even sing as a group, and they could hear you on the streets of Jackson. Here, as they pointed out to us, no reporters are coming to get you. So, the psychological component, after you go through this little exam, and then you’re in complete isolation and at their mercy, really played on a lot of minds."

While incarcerated, Joan applied to all-Black Tougaloo College in Jackson and was accepted. She was released in time to start in the fall, the first white student to enroll. There she jumped right back into her work for civil rights while keeping up with her studies. 

"White women with SNCC did not go into the Delta, did not go outside of Jackson. It would be counterproductive to go get us all killed, which made sense to me."

She did a lot of typing. And stuffing envelopes. The exciting work of making change. She met Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, the the first state field secretary of the NAACP.

It was Evers who planned the sit in at the Jackson Woolworth's, May 28, 1963. One of 300 that took place all over the south to end segregation, it ended up the most violent.

"I wasn't even supposed to be part of that," said Joan. "I was supposed to be a spotter, [the person with a dime in her pocket to call Medgar Evans back at the office]. 

"There were three students from Tougaloo sitting down: Annie Moody, Memphis Norman, and Perleana Lewis. And they were sitting together, with Memphis in the middle, and he got pulled off the stool and stomped and kicked....he was bleeding out of every hole in his head....That left the two girls alone. They were pulled off their stools, [and] struggled back."

With Normal hauled off by police, there was an empty seat at the counter. Joan sat down.

It was lunch time, the Woolworth's was near the high school and a crowd of school white students showed up at the closed counter, incensed they couldn't get lunch. Outside a mob was forming and men pushed into the store. 

"Medgar wants to come down, but he’s talked out of it, because he’d be killed pretty much on sight. But John Salter, a white [Tougaloo] professor, comes down and he makes his way to where Annie and I are sitting." 

John Salter was attacked with fists, brass knuckles, and the broken portions of glass sugar containers, and burned with cigarettes. The week before the Supreme Court had ruled police could not, of their own volition, go into a store and make arrests. They had to be invited in by the store manager.

Joan remembers the crowd completely out of control and the police outside laughing. She remembers mustard, ketchup, sugar, left over food and spray paint all flying at them.

"I didn't waste any energy on being afraid. I say that distracts your brain from what you need to be thinking on, and fear can get you killed."

It went on for three hours.

All in a days work for the brave men and women who committed themselves to the work of the civil rights movement. That summer, Joan moved back to Washington DC to help plan the March on Washington. It was a lot of typing.

But then would come the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four little girls...the trouble was only getting deeper and Joan was right in the middle of it.

Next week, I'll have the story of Joan's own close call with the KKK, they killed when she went free and what advice she has for us today in the face of rising fascism and violence.

Oh, and did her mother ever forgive Joan for her civil rights activism? Next week!

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