2015/02/02 – WASHINGTON – Joan Trumpauer Mulholland remembers the single road running through a wooded area that led to Tougaloo College.

Mulholland and other students involved in the civil rights movement 50 years ago knew the defenders of segregation parked along that road recording license plate numbers.

“If you could just get through that gate, you were safe,” recalls Mulholland, 73. “Everybody in the movement passed through Tougaloo. … It was ground zero for the movement in Mississippi.”

It was at Tougaloo College that Mulholland and other students determined to dismantle the state’s system of legal racial segregation say they found a welcoming environment.

The historically black college played a key role in the civil rights movement, setting the stage for protests and voting registration drives and serving as a training ground for students like Lawrence Guyot, who became a leader in the movement.

It also provided a resting place for weary Freedom Riders and offered space for strategy meetings led by Medgar Evers, president of the state’s NAACP. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in the college’s historic chapel.

Beverly Wade Hogan, Tougaloo’s president, says civic engagement has always been in the school’s DNA, but in the 1960s it moved to the forefront.

“Tougaloo became that safe haven for others who came to Mississippi to support social change,” Hogan says.

It was Tougaloo students in 1961 who led a protest to integrate the public library in Jackson, an effort credited with jump-starting the movement in the state.

It was on campus where Freedom Riders like Mulholland found shelter after being released from Parchman, a state prison, for trying to integrate public transportation.

“Everybody on campus was pretty much distracted by the movement. That was the most important thing going on,” recalls Reuben Anderson, 72, who in 1967 was the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi’s law school and who later became the state’s first black Supreme Court justice.

“Every night there was a meeting on campus to talk about what to do next,” he says.

Campus visitors included James Meredith, the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, and other activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ralph Bunche, Julian Bond, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Tougaloo served as a base for Freedom Summer, when hundreds of students came to Mississippi in 1964 to register blacks to vote. Guyot and other leaders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s all-white party, also met there.

“The heritage of the school as being the center for the civil rights movement really followed 150 years of American history,” says Ed King, the school chaplain during the height of the movement and a founder of the Freedom Democratic Party.

The private liberal arts college, which opened in 1866, was run by the American Missionary Association. Some of its first classes were literacy classes for freed slaves.

But the school also attracted students from across the country.

“Mississippi had become the challenge of the movement, so students were coming to experience it,” says Mulholland, who had come from Virginia and was one of a handful of white students. “It was Mississippi — the heart of darkness.’’

Tougaloo students weren’t the only activists from historically black colleges. Others came from Fisk in Nashville, LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee State University, Spelman College in Atlanta and Howard University in Washington, D.C.

But Tougaloo was battling brutal segregation in its backyard. Despite state laws designed to prevent blacks and whites from gathering, Tougaloo allowed them to meet.

And unlike other institutions and black colleges, Tougaloo didn’t rely on state aid and didn’t cave to pressure to clamp down on student activism.

“They didn’t send the students home for participating, for protesting. Rather, they would go down and get them out of jail,” Hogan says.

King says the administration allowed student activists, who were often the first in their families to attend college, to complete their studies while also being involved in the movement.

“We were determined to let them answer the call to duty on the front line, but they were (still) college students,” says King, who is writing his second book on the movement. “The idea of losing out on college … was a major sacrifice. Tougaloo tried to find ways for them to do both.”

The efforts were dangerous. There were bomb threats, arrests and court injunctions to stop the demonstrations. One faculty building was bombed.

Segregation supporters tried to strip the college of its charter and cut off its funding. But much of its funding came from groups outside Mississippi.

“There were efforts to really starve the college to death,” Hogan says. “Through it all, Tougaloo is standing today and still viable and still a very good institution and a real treasure for the state of Mississippi.”

Last summer, hundreds of civil rights veterans reunited on campus to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Young students sat beside legends like Bob Moses, who headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee operation in Mississippi.

Today, Tougaloo students are holding rallies to protest the shooting deaths of unarmed black teenagers Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Trayvon Martin in Florida.

“We encourage them to speak out,” Hogan says. “The challenges today are different. The approaches we have to use to make a difference are a little different, but our reasons and our commitment to making that difference remain the same.”

Contact Deborah Barfield Berry at dberry@gannett.com.

BLACK HISTORY

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Source: Deborah Barfield Berry 

Clarion Ledger-Washington Bureau