User:AECHill/sandbox

= Muriel Tillinghast =

Early Life
Muriel Tillinghast was born in the early 1940s in Washington, D.C., where she would remain until after graduating from college in 1964. She was influenced early on by her grandmother, Gloria Carter, who had walked to Washington, D.C. from a plantation in Texas around the year 1900, before marrying Tillinghast’s grandfather and starting a family. Tillinghast’s mother, who had a difficult time finding employment in D.C. in the 1950s as a result of segregation, worked as a teacher in Mississippi for many years, often leaving Tillinghast in the care of her grandmother. Her family, particularly her grandmother, was active in a number of D.C. organizations, and the Lutheran church. Tillinghast often attended these organizational meetings with her grandmother, which taught her about organizational tactics and the importance of civic engagement. This encouraged her organizational involvement early on, beginning with her role as a youth organizer in the Maryland Synod Luther League at the age of 9, and her long time dedication as a Girl Scout. The influence of her grandmother, and her early involvement in political organizing, solidified her organizational skills and prepared Tillinghast for a long life of political engagement.

Tillinghast remained in Washington D.C. for her secondary and higher education, attending D.C.’s Roosevelt high school amid the school’s integration efforts during her sophomore year. She then moved onto attend Howard University, where she would serve as the president of Howard’s Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) and go onto join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), before graduating in 1964 and continuing her activism from there.

Tillinghast was additionally inspired by her travels prior to graduating college to both Guyana and Southeast Asia. After returning from her travels to Guyana in the late 1950s and learning of the maroons, the swampy lands that enslaved individuals would escape to, Tillinghast was motivated to learn more, and further study the topic during her graduate school in the fall of 1967. Tillinghast also found inspiration in her travels to Southeast Asia, where she met individuals who had been jailed for demonstrating against, and criticizing their governments. Both of these travels led Tillinghast to realize how much she hadn’t been taught, further motivating her to fill the holes she noted in her education up to that point.

Civil Rights Activism
Throughout the early 1960s, Tillinghast became increasingly active in the growing civil rights movements, attending so many marches that it nearly “wore the sole and heels [of her shoes] down”. Tillinghast attended her first NAG meeting alongside a childhood friend, where she met civil rights organizer Stokely Carmichael (also known as Kwame Turé) and was immediately recruited to help organize a demonstration at the justice department set to occur the next day. Tillinghast continued to mobilize demonstrations and picket lines for NAG almost once a week, eventually becoming president and contributing to the desegregation efforts in Maryland, Delaware, and D.C..

These experiences would further prepare Tillinghast to join SNCC, where she first took on a field operations position, working on the ground, then moved to apply her strong organizational skills in their central operations.

Freedom Schools
Three days after graduating from Howard in 1964, Tillinghast packed up her belongings with plans to head to Mississippi to work on the Freedom Summer Project, much to the dismay of her mother, who was all too familiar with the violent racism across Mississippi, after teaching there throughout the 50s. She learned about the opportunity through Charlie Cobb, another Howard graduate and former NAG member, who led the development of the Freedom Schools as part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project.

The Freedom Schools educated young Black students in Mississippi, who were receiving inadequate and insufficient education, or being expelled from school for challenging the politics they learned in their local schools. College educated SNCC volunteers like Tillinghast traveled to Mississippi to provide young Black students with an education on things like citizenship and Black history through books and poems written by Black authors. This not only gave these students the opportunity to explore politics more freely, many for the first time in a classroom setting, but it also “paved the way for many young Black Mississippians to join the Movement”.

Tillinghast left D.C. with 11 other NAG members on June 12th, and headed to Oxford, Ohio for orientation, where volunteers were primed for the racial hostility they would face in Mississippi, before bussing into the state. Tillinghast was dropped off in Greenville, Mississippi where she would work under Cobb for two weeks before taking over the project in the Greenville area, which included Washington, Issaquena, and Sharkey counties.

While in Issaquena County, Tillinghast stayed in the home of Unita Blackwell, who would eventually go on to continue working with SNCC and become the first African American woman elected mayor in Mayersville, Mississippi. Blackwell, who had gotten involved in the Mississippi civil rights movement not long before meeting Tillinghast, began working with SNCC when she went to Greenville alongside Tillinghast. In her book, she recalled the impact of Tillinghast’s natural afro and her seemingly unwavering confidence in the face of Mississippi’s dangers.

Voter Registration
In addition to running the Freedom Schools, a major goal of the Mississippi Freedom Project was to increase voter registration in the Southern state. Tillinghast led voter registration efforts by getting to know locals and encouraging them to register to vote, sometimes while staying in their homes, or while walking alongside locals at 4 in the morning as they were on their way to work in the cottonfields (McKay, 2020). Tillinghast also led a mock election in Greenville in the hopes of demonstrating voter interest among Mississippians to the UN. Though even with these efforts, encouraging voter registration in Mississippi still proved difficult, given the state’s unique forms of voter suppression. Though monetary registration fees were made illegal, white Mississippians found other means of suppression and intimidation to prevent Black citizens from voting. Some Black voters who went to register at the courthouse were met with arbitrary tests like being made to guess how many jelly beans were in a jug or, as in the case of Unita Blackwell, were given a written exam and asked to “interpret the constitution”. Many wouldn’t even make it to the courthouse to register for fear of losing their jobs, homes, food assistance, or of being beaten or killed.

In 1961 the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was founded as an umbrella organization of civil rights groups (SNCC, CORE, SCLC, etc), largely made up of SNCC members. After the head of the Mississippi COFO stepped down, Tillinghast inherited the position while working in Mississippi in 1964. COFO would go on to direct additional voter registration projects, led by young Mississippians.

Struggles in Mississippi
Tillinghast faced many difficulties while leading the movements in Greenville. Volunteers were not widely well received in town, which often left them without housing or food for periods of time. They worked long hours, nearly 18 hours a day, but the most pay Tillinghast made could have been $10 a week, all of which went to meager food and housing during the Mississippi summer. However, Tillinghast emphasized the necessity of “liv[ing] with the people you want to change and shape” in order to truly serve a community without creating a counteractive class divide.

Volunteers also faced racism, violence, and discrimination in Mississippi by locals, most notably the local law enforcement. Issaquena county’s Sheriff Davis went so far as to construct a single room jail specifically for Tillinghast, and took to following her around town in his pickup truck, waiting to catch her doing something so that he had an excuse to jail the project director. Tillinghast developed new levels of patience to dismiss these attempts of intimidation, like walking slowly along the roads or walking miles through the brush to confuse the Sheriff, and eventually get her driver’s license in the state of Mississippi.

Later Life & Legacy
After leaving Mississippi in 1965, Tillinghast returned to Howard for her graduate studies in Mexican and Chinese history in 1967, before eventually moving to Manhattan and continuing her dedication to political organization. Tillinghast went on in the 70s to teach at Atlanta University’s School of Social Work, then serve as an administrator at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, advocating for tenants’ rights. Having been active in the Green Party, Tillinghast would go on to run as the vice president for New York Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 1996. Now raising her two daughters, she has said she was “born with a fighting nature” that has continued to drive her legacy of political activism.