White civil rights activist to return to Miss. 40 years later

Corey Carter could hear snippets of music in his head — a calm and subtle melody that hadn’t found its shape. The 19-year-old college student simply needed a hero to visualize before he could finish his composition for wind ensemble.

Standing in line at a Walgreens’ one day a few months ago, he casually flipped through a book about African-American history in his hometown of Jackson, Miss. There, he ran across the 1961 mug shotof a jailed civil-rights worker.

Around her neck hung a board with booking information for the Jackson city jail. She and other Freedom Riders had been arrested and charged with breach of peace after traveling in an integrated group, by train, from New Orleans.

The woman in the mug shot was Joan Trumpauer, who grew up in northern Virginia and spent three years in the early 1960s working for racial equality in Mississippi, then one of the most defiantly segregated states in the nation.

Carter, a University of Southern Mississippi music major and aspiring film composer, saw a woman who did more than talk about racial equality — she lived it.

Trumpauer — who would later marry and become Joan Trumpauer Mulholland — left Duke University in 1961. Defying the wishes of relatives who were steeped in a culture of segregation, she headed to Mississippi to work in the civil rights movement. She was inspired, she said, by the Bible’s call to love thy neighbor and the belief that all men are created equal.

“What brought me to the movement was, basically, you could see the inequalities in life and the contradictions,” she told The Associated Press in a recent interview from her home in Arlington, Va.

She served her first three sweaty summer months for the breach-of-peace arrest in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, now infamous for the beatings and other abuse Freedom Riders endured there.

One of her most frightening experiences came on May 28, 1963, when she helped challenge a whites-only policy at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. Her assignment fromMississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers — who would be assassinated about two weeks later — was to observe other civil-rights workers at a picket line elsewhere in downtown Jackson.

The picketers were quickly arrested, so Trumpauer Mulholland decided to see what was happening at Woolworth’s. The black college students trying to integrate the lunch counter were soon attacked by white teenagers and adults.

“If he had worn hard-soled shoes instead of sneakers, the first kick probably would have killed Memphis,” Moody wrote. “Finally a man dressed in plain clothes identified himself as a police officer and arrested Memphis and his attacker.”

Trumpauer Mulholland said she and John Salter, a white Tougaloo professor who was active in the NAACP, went to the Woolworth’s counter to sit with the black civil-rights volunteers who were still there. The threat of violence was palpable.

The civil-rights workers were able to leave in relative safety when the store closed that night, but only because Tougaloo president A.D. Biettel came to escort them out. Moody said in her memoir that outside the store, about 90 Jackson police officers formed a line between the small group and an angry white mob.