Sat 6/8 @ 11AM-2PM
With powerful, well-funded forces on the far right trying to indoctrinate and groom school kids by concealing large swaths of inconvenient truths from them and lying about American history to depict straight white male “Christians” as saints and others as basically nonexistent, someone has to strike back. That’s what the Zinn Education Project National Teach Truth Day of Action campaign is trying to do, with almost 100 events around the country featuring civil rights speakers, education activists, and free banned books.
One of them will be taking place at the Cleveland Downtown Library. It will feature a legendary figure from the 1960s Civil Rights movement” Joan Trumpauer Mulholland.
Descended from slave owners in Georgia, she began to be disturbed by racial disparities as a young girl in the early 50s. By the early 60s, she’d dropped out of college after a year, joined the Freedom Riders in Mississippi and, still a teenager, was arrested and incarcerated in one of Mississippi’s worst prisons. Inspired by the difficulties Black students encountered enrolling in segregated universities, she enrolled in HBCU Tugaloo Collage. Her family disowned her. She was undeterred.
At the Cleveland Library, Trumpauer Mulholland, now 82, will be joined by one of her sons, Loki Mulholland. She’ll also be joined by local speakers Honey Bey-Bell, 2020 Cuyahoga County Poet Laureate, George Washington University student Kayla Blake, Ohio State Representative Juanita Brent, 2024 Ohio Teacher of the Year, District 11 Shanti’ Coaston, and Julia Finley Mosca, author of several banned books. It’s free and open at all.
The event will be followed at 5:30pm by a reception for Mulholland at ThirdSpace Action Lab in University Circle. The public is invited.
honestyforohioeducation.org/teach-truth-rally
525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114