This Freedom Rider was shot at, attacked, and put on death row—all by 20 years old
Joan Trumpauer went from being a sheltered white southerner to a bold civil rights activist and Freedom Rider
Joan Trumpauer spent ten days in a Mississippi jail in the summer of 1961 before she was marched out of her cell and loaded into a bus. She’d been arrested for sitting in a whites-only waiting room in Jackson, Mississippi, with her fellow Freedom Riders — some white, like her, some African American. At age 20, she already had two years of experience being arrested and thrown in jail for her role in the civil rights movement. She’d even smiled faintly in her mug shot taken at the Hinds County jail.
As Trumpauer left Jackson behind, she didn’t know if her life was about to get better or worse. The Riders, many of whom were student activists from groups like the Congress of Racial Equality, the Nonviolent Action Group, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, weren’t actually breaking the law when they were arrested — in 1960, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated interstate buses were unconstitutional. Southern states nevertheless continued to enforce Jim Crow as if nothing had happened.
The legality of the Riders’ actions seemed to feed the fury of southern whites. A month before Trumpauer was arrested, the first bus carrying Riders had been firebombed by a white mob. The same day, another group of Riders were beaten bloody in a Mississippi bus terminal.
Trumpauer understood she could be hurt or killed when she joined the Freedom Riders, but she couldn’t have anticipated this: the bus pulled up at Parchman prison, home of Mississippi’s death row. She knew it well. “We wanted to believe we were coming out of this in one piece,” Trumpauer recounts in the documentary Ordinary People, “but it was a place of legend for brutality.”
Trumpauer, a native southerner, was the great-granddaughter of Georgia slave owners and the daughter of a staunch segregationist. “I lived in an all-white world,” she explains in an oral history archived in the Library of Congress. She credits a northern father and living in the only apartment complex in her hometown of Arlington, Virginia, that rented to Jewish people among her saving graces. She met people with more liberal views. Still, beginning in early childhood, her mother taught her to essentially unsee black people in her daily life, to gaze serenely past them on sidewalks and buses.
That changed when she was ten. While visiting her family in Georgia, Trumpauer and a friend took on a dare to go to the African American part of town, referred to as “Niggertown” by local whites. Trumpauer was stunned by the poverty she saw and the way black people shrank from her as she walked through town. “Everyone just evaporated as we walked down the sidewalk,” she says. “I could see with my own eyes the disparity.”
Her horror turned to determination. “I felt as a southerner that we should change, and when I saw my chance to do something, I would seize it,” she said. The civil rights movement provided that chance when she was a first-year student at Duke University. She participated in lunch counter sit-ins and other protests, and the summer after her freshman year, she dropped out of Duke and joined the Nonviolent Action Group, based at Howard University.
She played a crucial role in the logistics of the Freedom Rides as a member of the group before she became a Rider herself and ended up in Parchman.
Parchman prison, a low-slung brick building surrounded by dirt rows and fields, was essentially a plantation. Prisoners were leased and subleased to pick cotton, work they did linked together on a chain gang, all dressed identically in black and white stripes. They worked six days a week. The guards routinely beat men while they were restrained. It was “probably one of the most violent and worst places a human could be,” said Ruben Anderson, a former Mississippi Supreme Court justice. William Faulkner referred to the prison as “destination doom.”
The governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, meant to intimidate would-be Freedom Riders with the horrors of Parchman and deter the integrated groups from wreaking havoc on the South’s system of apartheid. The social separation of blacks and whites, especially the segregation of black men from white women, was crucial to maintaining social inequality. Barnett made a visit to the prison on the day the Riders arrived to forbid them from working — or going outside at all.
The psychological and physical abuse started as soon as they walked into the prison. “We had stripped and got examined, a vaginal exam — matrons had on rubber gloves and would dip them into what smelled sort of like Lysol or some concoction like that, and then they’d gouge up us and back into the Lysol, or whatever it was, and on to the next one,” Trumpauer recalls. “Showed they could do anything they wanted to us, and probably would.”
After the strip search, Trumpauer was issued a rough denim skirt with black and white stripes and a T-shirt. All of her possessions were taken, including the diary she’d hidden in the hem of her skirt. She was taken to cell 14 on death row, which had been cleared to house Freedom Riders, likely as an intimidation technique. There was a bunk bed, and a stainless-steel toilet with a sink a foot from the bed. The walls and the bars were gray. Eventually two other women, also Freedom Riders, shared the six-by-eight-foot cell with her.
Like the other Riders in Parchman, Trumpauer refused bail, and she lived in the cell for two months. Her torment, in contrast to the exam on her first day, was exclusively psychological. Their once-weekly mail delivery was their only point of contact with the outside world. Trumpauer used the envelopes to make a deck of cards, playing solitaire to pass the time.
She remembers the isolation from her movement compatriots as the worst part of her confinement. Blacks and whites were separated in the Parchman cells, and men and women were kept in separate wings of the prison. She had little in common with the northern white women in her cell who’d joined the Freedom Riders. The only time she saw her fellow southerners was when she was allowed to shower twice a week. She could, however, hear them, and they sang together up and down the row of cells — movement songs that infuriated the guards but helped the prisoners to stay sane.
The governor’s plan was a failure. Four hundred Freedom Riders poured into the South that summer, undeterred by the threat of prison. When she left the jail in September, Trumpauer again enraged segregationists by promptly enrolling in the historically black Tougaloo College and becoming the first white woman accepted into the Sigma Delta Theta sorority. At Tougaloo, she continued to agitate for civil rights and was one of the three people captured in an iconic photo of the civil rights movement, sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter as a mob of angry young white men poured food over her head.
When she left Tougaloo, she moved back to Virginia, where she married and where she still lives today. She led a quiet life as the movement drew to a close and until recently was a footnote in the civil rights movement. She’s started speaking out about her role only in the past five years, participating in remembrances of the movement, documentaries, and oral histories.
Today, Trumpauer’s improvised playing cards from Parchman are in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and her mug shot from her Jackson arrest is on display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But the violence she encountered did take a lifelong toll. She’s now in her seventies, and still can’t bear the smell of Lysol.
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