YOUNGSTOWN — When she was 10 years old, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland walked with a friend near a set of railroad tracks in the black section of a small Georgia town and noticed that many of the residents ducked back into their homes, unaccustomed to seeing two white girls.

She said she also was deeply troubled by the gross disparities between the town’s white and black schools, the result of firmly entrenched segregation and Jim Crow laws. The ramshackle school for black students hadn’t been painted and had no heat, electricity or playground, yet the white school was a state-of-the-art brick building with the latest amenities.

Those two eye-openers also changed her life by serving as entry points for her foray into the modern civil rights movement, she said.

“I recognized the huge economic divisions in the South between white and black people. I realized the system must be changed,” recalled Mulholland, 79, of Arlington, Va.

For her work as a civil rights activist and standing for what she felt was right, Mulholland was the recipient of this year’s Simeon Booker Award for Courage. Mulholland, who also took part in the 1961 Freedom Rides, was honored during a Zoom program Tuesday evening at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St.

The 90-minute gathering also was part of Nonviolence Week in Ohio and hosted by Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past.

The award was named after the late Booker, who became the Washington Post’s first full-time black reporter, then, beginning in 1954, worked many years for Jet magazine. Booker, who attended one year at Youngstown College — now Youngstown State University — and transferred to Virginia Union University in Richmond, was perhaps most famous for breaking the story of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was murdered in Money, Miss., in August 1955 after having allegedly wolf-whistled at a white woman.

By age 23, Mulholland said she had taken part in about 50 protests and sit-in movements, the most violent of which was the May 28, 1963, sit-in at an F.W. Woolworth store’s lunch counter in Jackson, Miss., where she served as a “spotter” for counter-protesters.

After several black students from nearby Tougaloo College were kicked and thrown to the ground, Mulholland took a seat at the counter, which she said infuriated many in the mob of several hundred. She was dragged outside before returning.

The thugs also poured condiments on the nonviolent, mixed-race sit-in participants and put out a cigarette on the back of the neck of one of them before the store was ordered to close around 2 p.m.

The feeling “was like an out-of-body experience,” Mulholland said, adding she initially was convinced none of the students would make it out alive.

After dropping out of Duke University, Mulholland became the first white woman to enroll at Tougaloo College, as well as the first white member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

She, along with many other Freedom Riders, was arrested in 1961 for sitting in and refusing to leave a whites-only waiting room in Jackson with fellow riders, some of whom were black. She served about two months in a 48-square-foot cell with two other women on Death Row at Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Penitentiary.

“I spent the summer on Death Row, but I considered it free room and board,” Mulholland said to laughter.

In addition to the dangers she faced — including having been hunted by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 — her actions also alienated Mulholland from her segregationist mother, she said.

Mulholland, who retired after having taught English as a second language about 40 years, said she’s disillusioned to see the level of violence in today’s society. It festers in part because too many people in power either support it or refuse to oppose it, she said.

Various forms of discrimination remain today so students should find what interests them, collaborate with like-minded people and work on changing what is wrong, she advised. Such action could lead to major social change, as did the Woolworth sit-in action, said Mulholland, who in 2014 founded the Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Foundation, which seeks to end racism via education.

The longtime civil rights icon expressed deep gratitude for having received the Simeon Booker Award for Courage, calling Booker “a hero to me” because he was part of the press corps that risked their lives to disseminate stories about the movement.

“An award with a name as renowned as this press person is particularly good,” said Mulholland, who called herself “a survivor.”

Attendees also watched “An Ordinary Hero,” a 2013 documentary her son, Loki, produced and directed about her life in the movement.

news@tribtoday.com