The Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University announces that activist and Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, winner of a 2015 Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, will keynote the 10th Annual Creative Arts Festival: Ordinary Heroes ~ The (Un)Examined Life at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 16, in the JSU Student Center Theater.
Featuring student performances, panel presentations, a documentary and exhibition about Mulholland’s life, the Creative Arts Festival will take place Friday and Saturday, April 15-16, at JSU. All events are free and open to the public.
By the time she was 19 years old, Mulholland had participated in more than three dozen sit-ins and protests, and she had been put on death row in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary with other Freedom Riders. She was involved in one of the most famous and violent sit-ins of the civil rights movement at the Jackson Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1963, and she helped plan and organize the March on Washington. For her actions as a white Southern woman, she was disowned by her family, attacked, shot at, cursed at, and hunted down by the Klan for execution. She has been written about in several books and has appeared on television and news programs such as Oprah and the CBS Nightly News. And, her story and experiences have been highlighted in award-winning documentaries, including An Ordinary Hero, PBS’s Freedom Riders and the groundbreaking film Eyes on the Prize.
Mulholland has received numerous awards for her activism, including recognition, along with other female Freedom Riders, by President Barack Obama; the Anti-Defamation League Annual Heroes Against Hate Award; and a 2015 Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum.
The Creative Arts Festival will kick off with a screening of the documentary An Ordinary Hero about Mulholland’s life at 2 p.m. Friday, April 15, in
Room 166/266 of the Dollye M.E. Robinson College of Liberal Arts Building. The film will be followed immediately by a discussion with Mulholland; her son and filmmaker Loki Mulholland; Dr. Elayne Hayes Anthony, dean of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at JSU; and Dr. Rickey Hill, chair of JSU’s Department of Political Science. A reception will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday at the Margaret Walker Center in Ayer Hall for the opening of the exhibition “An Ordinary Hero.”
On Saturday, April 16, student presentations will take place over the course of the day during concurrent sessions in the JSU Student Center, and a luncheon and poetry reading with the JSU ensemble Outspoken will be at noon in the JSU Student Center, Ballroom B. The keynote address by Mulholland and an awards ceremony, including the presentation of the annual $1,000 Margaret Walker award for the best essay by a JSU student, will conclude the CAF at 3 p.m. in the Student Center Theater.
For more information, visit the Center’s website at www.jsums.edu/margaretwalkercenter or contact the Center’s staff at 601-979-3935 or mwa@jsums.edu.
This project is supported in part by funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a state agency, and in part from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.