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Winter chill and slushy streets did not stop about 100 people from gathering at the Tinner Hill Monument on Saturday, Jan. 18, for Falls Church’s Annual March for Unity and Freedom.

Marchers assembled early in the morning to create protest signs and honor the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the opening day of the national holiday weekend. Their starting point carried special significance: The first rural chapter of the NAACP was founded in the Tinner Hill neighborhood in 1918, when local Black activists challenged racial segregation imposed by the City of Falls Church.

The celebration, which also included a social justice workshop, was coordinated by the Social Justice Committee of Falls Church and Vicinity, the City of Falls Church and the Chi Beta Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc.

Civil rights activist Joan Mulholland, 83, delivered the day’s central message: Lasting change requires preparation, cooperation and the courage to act without being controlled by fear.

Marchers Take Over South Washington Street

Unlike the previous year, marchers were permitted to walk down the middle of South Washington Street, also known as Lee Highway, while vehicle traffic was temporarily closed.

A year earlier, participants had been restricted to sidewalks beside passing cars and buses. Organizers then called attention to the irony of marching along a road named for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and built through an African American community taken by eminent domain—while being denied permission to walk in the roadway.

This time, the march took to the street.

After remarks by Falls Church Mayor Letty Hardi and Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation founder Ed Henderson, followed by an invocation, the bundled-up crowd traveled nearly half a mile east to Falls Church Episcopal.

Hardi joined the procession alongside City Council member Justine Underhill and City Manager Wyatt Shields. Former Council member Phil Duncan attended the indoor program.

At the church, participants received hot drinks and a catered lunch before beginning an afternoon program titled “Mission Possible—Protecting Freedom, Justice, and Democracy: What Can I Do?”

Retired pastor the Rev. Gregory Loewer welcomed the gathering and offered an invocation. Music coordinator Rich Scott then led a standing singalong of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with vocals by Josephine Arrington and Shanel Thomas.

Mulholland Recalls the Risks of Resistance

Mulholland entered the civil rights movement when protesting segregated facilities could bring arrest, violent assault or death threats. By age 23, she had participated in more than 50 sit-ins and demonstrations.

Her activism included the Freedom Rides, the Jackson Woolworth sit-in, the March on Washington, the Meredith March and the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Her involvement led to estrangement from her family, arrests, attacks and threats from the Ku Klux Klan. She also worked alongside movement leaders including King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Diane Nash and Julian Bond.

Her experiences have appeared in documentaries including “An Ordinary Hero,” “Freedom Riders,” “Standing on My Sister’s Shoulders” and “Eyes on the Prize.”

Wearing a red head scarf and a black shirt bearing large images of King, Mulholland opened with humor before urging the audience to work across organizational lines. She recalled how members of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, cooperated with Alpha Kappa Alpha members during the civil rights era.

She described demonstrators returning from sit-ins bruised and covered in dirt, with supporters waiting to clean them up. Not everyone, she said, had to accept the same front-line risks.

Those who could not sit at a lunch counter or face arrest could drive activists, monitor crowds, prepare meals or provide visitors with a place to sleep. Movements needed as many people supporting participants as confronting injustice directly.

“Work together to make freedom happen,” Mulholland said. “And don’t be afraid. Fear will paralyze your brain and keep you from thinking of what you need to be doing in the situation.”

Images That Carried a Protest Around the World

Mulholland also stressed the press’s ability to expose injustice beyond the site of a protest.

Activists could take an issue to the street and lawyers could take it to court, she said, but journalists could carry it to the world. Reporters and photographers often faced the same danger as demonstrators—and could be attacked first by people trying to prevent images from getting out.

She pointed to the widely circulated photograph of the integrated 1963 sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. The demonstrators included Black and White participants as well as a Native American professor.

Before the group settled at the counter, another demonstrator had been dragged from his stool and kicked until his head was bleeding, Mulholland recalled. A local television cameraman recording the violence was knocked down and had his camera broken.

Mulholland said the photographer who captured the famous still image initially sympathized with some of the White students tormenting the demonstrators. After watching the protesters endure abuse without retaliating for three hours, however, he came to support them.

A student from another White segregationist high school also changed his outlook after seeing the photographs in that evening’s newspaper, she said.

“Your actions can change people’s attitudes,” Mulholland told the audience.

A March Is Only the Beginning

Mulholland praised the Falls Church crowd for marching despite the weather but warned that legal victories against segregation had not eliminated discrimination.

Bias now had to be confronted in its many forms, she said, including discrimination involving race, national origin, language, disability, gender identity and religion.

Effective action requires more than deciding to hold a march, Mulholland continued. Organizers must identify allies, establish a specific plan, know when and where they will act, prepare for possible arrests and keep a lawyer’s phone number close at hand. They may also need to raise bail money.

She recalled that Medgar Evers and the NAACP helped secure bond money for activists in Jackson, while the Congress of Racial Equality supported the campaign.

Mulholland said she learned only decades later that liberal White women in Jackson had quietly collected money for the movement and passed it through their maids. She discovered that support during a chance conversation with a woman on a cruise.

It had taken more than 50 years for her to hear the story, she said, demonstrating that movements often receive help from people whose contributions remain unseen.

Arrested for Taking a Freedom Ride to College

Mulholland estimated that she had been arrested about six times, including an incarceration for contempt of court and a detention in Baton Rouge. She described those experiences as getting into the “good trouble” championed by her friend John Lewis.

She remembered Lewis as a Southern gentleman who always greeted her with a hug, whether she approached him or he asked her for one. After his death, she jokingly assigned that role to U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a fellow graduate of Tougaloo College.

Audience questions then prompted Mulholland to revisit her decision to become the first White student to integrate Tougaloo, a historically Black college in Mississippi, in 1960.

Mulholland had attended Duke University as a freshman and became involved in sit-ins. When she sought to transfer, her former all-White high school in Annandale refused to send her transcript to Tougaloo. The college instead admitted her using her Duke records.

She traveled to Mississippi on an integrated Freedom Ride. Authorities arrested her and sent her to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, where she was confined in death-row cells.

A Childhood Memory That Set Her Course

Nikki Graves Henderson, the wife of Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation founder Edwin Henderson II, introduced her 9-year-old granddaughter and asked what Mulholland had been doing at that age that helped place her on the path toward civil rights activism.

Mulholland recalled being about 9 or 10 while visiting her grandmother in Oconee, Georgia. She and another White girl ventured down a dirt road into the town’s Black neighborhood, despite being told not to go there.

The entire company-owned logging town was poor, but the homes in the Black section were in even worse condition. Residents withdrew from view as the two girls approached.

Mulholland then saw the school for Black children: an unpainted, one-room shack with a potbellied stove, open windows covered only by wooden shutters, and no electricity or running water.

At the other end of town stood a new brick school for White children, equipped with modern amenities. The contrast clashed with what she had been taught in Sunday school about loving one’s neighbors and treating others as she wished to be treated.

She could not yet fully express what she felt, Mulholland said, but she resolved to help make the South better when an opportunity arose. That opportunity came with the sit-in movement.

Asked how people should respond to current political fears, Mulholland offered a one-word directive: “Vote!”

The crowd gave her a standing ovation before dividing into workshop groups to discuss ways to defend freedom, justice and democracy. Inga Watkins of the Social Justice Committee later led a full-group discussion of the actions proposed during those sessions.

The program ended with “If I Had a Hammer,” closing remarks from committee chair Phil Christensen and a final group rendition of “We Shall Overcome”—sending participants out to pursue some “good trouble” of their own.