Joan was locked in a cramped cell with 17 other women. Before being imprisoned, she was stripped and subjected to a humiliating vaginal examination. “They showed they could do anything they wanted to us and probably would,” she later recalled.
She was 19 years old. She refused to pay bail. She served her full sentence—two months—plus extra time to work off the $200 fine.
When most people would have gone home to safety, Joan enrolled at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Jackson. She became one of the first white students—and the first white woman—to attend. Crosses were burned on campus. She received death threats. But she stayed.
At Tougaloo, Joan met Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders. She became secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the first white member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
On May 28, 1963, Joan participated in what became the most violent sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson. For three hours, a mob screamed “race traitor” at her, threw food, cut her with broken glass, and burned her with cigarettes. The police stood by and watched.
Joan thought: We’re going to die. “My spirit had left my body and was hovering somewhere above, protecting me,” she remembered. But they held their ground.
The iconic photograph from that day became one of the most famous images of the movement.
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