Joan Mulholland: The Dean of Women Made Me Call Mom
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a freshman at Duke in the spring of 1960, and was actively involved in the local sit-in movement, something that she hadn’t shared with her parents until the university’s Dean of Women got involved.
In Durham in 1960, we picketed pretty regularly, almost daily, and I was arrested twice at sit-ins. If we sat-in, we were arrested boom-boom. I didn’t tell my parents until the the Dean of Women summonsed me and my roommate, who had also been arrested, to her office and locked the door, and told us we were going to call our parents.
We called them with the Dean sitting there. We weren’t going to get out until we did [laughs]. I think I got my mother, who just was an unrepentant segregationist, which was the way she grew up in Georgia. She wasn’t vicious about it, just run-of-the-mill.
She would always express to me her upset and worry about my safety, that type of thing. But this time she said, “How would I explain this to my friends?” Of course, I just kept going.
Mulholland was arrested on June 8 at the train station in Jackson.
More posts by and about Joan Trumpauer Mulholland:
3 Comments