Our celebrant today, is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. Si is the activist who became the first white person to attend an all black school. In 1961, Joan was bold enough to attend Tougaloo College in protest against the strong racism of the era..

How it started :

Joan Mulholland was born by civil servants who were ardent christains. But as a young child, she felt they were not practicing what they preached. And by the time she was a teenager, she became an activist against racism.

Protest and Detention

When Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was nineteen years old, she joined the protest against inequality. And it was during one of these protests, she was arrested and detained. But her detention was in a mental institution because they did not understand two things.

First, they did not understand why a young Caucasian girl was protesting for Africans. And secondly, they did not understand why she was so passionate about it. However, after two months of checking and testing, Joan got a clean bill of health.

Disowned

Next, her family did everything to stop her from protesting, and “embarrassing” them but Joan Trumpauer Mulholland only got more involved in the fight for equal rights. Therefore, her family disowned her. As if that was not enough, Joan dropped out of Duke University because the Dean of her faculty also asked her to stop protesting. You can not imagine how brave it was at that time to defend people with a darker skin tone. Because not only did the KKK came after many of these protesters, the authorities blackmailed them to stop protesting.

The Results:-

Joan Trumpauer simply went to the Tougaloo College as the only Caucasian girl in a school full of Africans. Coincidentally, she met other civil rights activists like Edward King and MLK to mention a few. And her protest paid off because the world of now that she is eighty-six is better than the world which she lived in all those years ago at nineteen.

Do you know there were other brave hearts like her? They also protested at their work places at the risk of losing it all. Some were celebrities. Can you name the ones that you know in the comments section below?

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