60 -Joan Mulholland-
Born: September 14, 1941 (age 76 years), Washington, D.C.
Known for: Freedom Riders
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is an American civil
rights activist and a Freedom Rider from Arlington, Virginia. She is known for taking part in sit-ins, being the first white to integrate Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi and to join Delta Sigma Theta sorority, joining Freedom Rides, and being held on death row in Parchman Penitentiary. After the new group of Freedom Riders were arrested for refusing to leave a bus waiting area in Jackson, Mississippi, Mulholland and others were put inside a paddy wagon to be taken to the most dreaded prison in Mississippi. This was the Parchman Penitentiary, a jail in the Delta, not far from where Emmett Till had been murdered. This prison was known to be very violent, and several people had gone in and disappeared. It was June of 1961. Mulholland was 19 at the time and refused to pay bail.
Born: February 24, 1938, in Charleston, South Carolina.
Grew up in Rochester, New York. A member of a NAACP youth group in junior high and high school.
Student at the University of Rochester, where he had helped start a CORE chapter. Also a conscientious objector.