Joan Trumpauer Mulholland grew up in Virginia in the 1950s and often visited her grandmother in Georgia where she witnessed the injustice of segregation firsthand. As a teenager she joined the Civil Rights Movement, attending demonstrations and sit-ins and was one of the Freedom Riders in 1961 who was arrested and put on death row for months at the notorious Parchman Prison. She was a white student at a traditionally black university, Tougaloo College. She was the first white person to join in the 1963 Woolworth s lunch counter sit-ins in Jackson, Mississippi, and that same year participated in the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 which contributed to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act that year. Her willingness to stand up for justice has been an inspiration, "Anyone can make a difference. It doesn't matter how old or young you are. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember, you don't have to change the world . . . just change"your"world."
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