Serena Ebhardt will play Joan Trumpauer Mulholland in The Parchman Hour…
Learn about the Freedom Riders…
| 3 
| 
| 
By Melody Guyton Butts
mbutts@heraldsun.com; 419-6684
DURHAM
– A young white woman of privilege, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland didn’t
face the prejudices of her darker-skinned contemporaries in the Jim Crow
South. She wasn’t prohibited from sitting at lunch counters. She wasn’t
relegated to substandard drinking fountains because of the color of her
skin. She wasn’t forced to fight her way through angry mobs on her way
to school.
But Mulholland, the daughter of a strict segregationist, knew it wasn’t right.
“I
could see that we did not practice what we preached, and I resolved, in
the era of mass resistance, that when I had the chance to help change
things, I would seize the moment,” she told a standing-room-only crowd
gathered for Carolina Friends School’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day
celebration Monday.
Her chance came as a student at Duke
University in the early 1960s, when she joined the picket line of black
students from what was then North Carolina College (now N.C. Central
University). That led to her involvement in sit-ins, voter-registration
drives and, perhaps most famously, the Freedom Rides, an effort by
activists to test interstate travel desegregation laws in the South.
When
she arrived in Jackson, Miss., as part of the June 4, 1961, Mississippi
Freedom Ride, Mulholland, then 19, was arrested. She ended up spending
more than two months in the Parchman Farm prison. Her story is among
those chronicled in the PBS documentary “Freedom Riders,” available
online at http://to.pbs.org/mP8dX8.
The documentary inspired the
folks planning Carolina Friends’ annual MLK celebration to invite her to
speak before students, parents and community members on Monday.
Event
emcee Thomas Patterson, director of youth programs in Duke University’s
Continuing Studies department, said Mulholland’s story was also his
own.
“It’s my story because I know what it’s like to go to separate schools,” he began.
He
recalled busloads of white kids making obscene gestures as they passed
by him and his siblings and having to drink water from a pipe protruding
from the wall, while whites had the luxury of a “pearl white, enamel
water fountain.”
He thanked Mulholland for risking her life in the name of equality.
In
addition to Mulholland’s address, Monday’s program included
performances by the school’s drumming ensemble, community chorus and
children’s choir and a dance presentation by upper school students. Also
performing were actors Doug Bynum and Kashif Powell, who presented a
scene from GoingBarefoot’s production of “The Parchman Hour,” which
celebrates the work of the Freedom Riders.
Carolina Friends was
founded in 1962 as one of the first schools in the South to model racial
integration as a core principle. As a private Quaker school, the school
stresses the importance of peaceful conflict resolution and the
importance of service, in alignment with King’s ideals.
While
most schools close for the MLK holiday, Carolina Friends each year opens
its doors for half a day on the third Monday in January to honor the
civil rights leader’s legacy through celebration and service. Before the
all-school assembly, students sorted books for a Book Harvest drive,
collected nonperishable foods for a food drive and engaged in civil
rights-focused educational activities.
Mulholland urged those
assembled to celebrate the legacy of King by honoring not just the civil
rights leader, but “the thousands, even millions, who were and are part
of his crusade for justice and nonviolence in the world: the Negro
citizens of Montgomery who would not ride buses, the children who walked
through mobs to integrate public schools, the college students who by
the hundreds sat at lunch counters, waiting to be served.”
They
were “ordinary, everyday people just like you” who saw things that
needed to be done and followed the lead of King, she told the crowd.
“Today,
we are still facing problems – war, discrimination of many kids,
ethnic, racial, religious, gender, gender orientation, just for
starters,” Mulholland said. “We face poverty, health care issues and
much more. And you, today’s students, are the future. Learn from the
past. Be inspired by Dr. King, and apply it to your own life. And march
forward until victory is truly won.”
http://www.ebzb.org
