Class of ’59 Alumni Joan Trumpauer Mulholland recalls her time at AHS and the consequences she faced as a white young Civil Rights Activist. Mulholland went to Annandale for three years and remembers how different things were compared to how they are now.

“You think Annandale’s food is bad now, you could not imagine how bad it was,” Mulholland said. Mulholland’s friend had given a pork chop with green slime to his mother, a nurse so that it could be tested. Due to the results of the porkchop, Mulholland and her classmates started a strike against the food the cafeteria was serving, however Principal Ralph Buckley shut it down by threatening to close down the cafeteria.

She also faced gender discrimination. She applied for a foreign exchange student program to go overseas and was rejected because she was not male. However, her father arranged for her to go to Europe to visit pen pals she had sent “snail mail” to.

“I know your school has a nice plaque up of Mr. Buckley, but that is not the way I remember him,” said Mulholland. Principal Buckley refused to approve Mulholland’s two week absence from school to go to Europe until her father intervened.

Mulholland had to share a locker with three other students due to the overpopulation of the school at the time. She wanted to go to a small church school in Ohio, but her mother disapproved and forced her to apply to a segregated school: Duke University.

“The guidance counselor, I don’t know what I had done to tick her off, but she got all hoffy and said it was a waste of time to apply because I won’t get in but I did,” Mulholland said.

Mulholland finished the semester, took a year off and then applied to a historical African American University, Tougaloo College in Mississippi. She received a call from the University saying they had not received her grades from AHS. She called the same guidance counselor and asked why she would not send her transcript, and she simply just refused to send it to a historical black college. Tougaloo accepted her based on her DU grades because AHS refused. She was first whites to enroll in Tougaloo College and continued her activism.

As a white teenager, Mulholland took action and fought for equality even though she was privileged.

“As a southern I felt called to do what I could do to make life equal for all,” Mulholland said. She was jailed for a few months during Freedom Riders, encountered violent mobs including the KKK and fought along the side of civil right heroes.

Mulholland’s story has turned from an award-winning documentary into a nonfiction children’s book She Stood for Freedom composed by her son, Loki Mulholland. In the book, he wrote about his mother’s experiences as a white women in the south that was fighting for African American rights. She has influenced her son and others by showing how an ordinary individual can have such a drastic impact on the civil rights movement.

Mulholland being white privileged women could have had a safe and easy life, yet she decided to go up against the odds of her race, parents and friends to fight against the inequality she witnessed growing up. She know tells her story to influence others to focus on the greater good.