Thirty-Eighth Issue: A Civil Rights Activist, A Pilot, and A Princess

This issue I will be talking about three different people. They don’t really have anything much connecting them except that I found them interesting. If you know any person, thing, or place that you think I should write about, please feel free to suggest them to me for a future issue.

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is a civil rights activist and Freedom Rider who is from Arlington, Virginia. She was born in Washington DC, and her mother’s family was from Georgia. They were slave owners. Her mother was the first to marry a man from the north in their family, but her parents were racist and had hateful points of view. She went to church and Sunday school where she learned about morality and equality, which did not match the hatred that she saw from her parents and the segregation she saw in Washington DC at the time. This led to tension between Joan and her parents, who insisted she go to Duke University because she didn’t think that it would be integrated as other colleges were beginning to do at the time.

In 1960, Joan participated in her first sit-in and was arrested. Because she was a white and southern woman, people thought she was mentally ill and had her tested. She wore a skirt with a ruffled hem and hid a diary in it when she was in prison that she used to record her experiences. She wrote that she’d rather be locked in with the black girls who were more religious and southern like her instead of the white girls who were atheists and from the north. She also wrote that the faculty of Duke supported her, but the administration didn’t, and under pressure from them she dropped out of school.

 

 

The next year, Joan helped the Freedom Riders, which was a multiracial group of activists who decided to travel together despite the segregation of buses in the south.  When the riders stopped in Alabama and were beaten as their bus was set on fire, they called Joan and asked for more riders. She joined Stokely Carmichael and others to take on the Freedom Riders cause. They were arrested in Mississippi and taken to a jail that had a reputation for violence and ‘disappearing’ inmates. Joan was just nineteen at the time.

In prison, the women were strip-searched, and given vaginal exams. Joan was segregated from the rest of her friends and didn’t know what was going on. They were kept on death row for two full months. When Joan finally got out, she heard about two black students who were the first to enroll at the University of Georgia. She decided that she would do the same, and became the first white student to enroll in Tougaloo College in Jackson, where she met famous civil rights activists of the time including Martin Luther King Jr. She also became secretary for the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). While she was on campus, crosses would be burned sometimes and others tried to shut down the school because they were afraid that she would get together with one of the black male students on campus, but they failed to close it. She got many threatening letters at the time as well. Her parents tried to get her to leave by sending her on a trip to Europe, but she just came back right after summer vacation.

 

 

In 1963, Joan was one of the fourteen activists who participated in the Woolworth lunch counter sit-in in Jackson. She was joined by fellow students, professors, and chaplains. She and the others were “beaten, smeared with condiments, berated” and yelled at. As Joan arrived to Woolworth’s, one activist was dragged to the floor and kicked until a police officer arrested both the activist and the assailant. Ann Moody, a fellow student of Joan’s, was thrown against the counter and pulled out of her seat. She was lifted from her stool just as Joan was lifted from hers, and both were dragged out of the store by their hair. The man who dragged them both was arrested outside and both Joan and Ann went back inside. The crowd became even more violent. One activist was burned on his neck by a cigarette, hit with brass knuckles in the face, and had pepper thrown into her eyes. Finally the President of Tougaloo College was able to reach the National Office of Woolworth’s, who told the manager to shut down the store. It was one of the most violent sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

 

A few months later that same year, Joan was one of the many who helped organize the March on Washington. She participated in the event and met many of the famous figures of the movement. Later in life, she became an ESL teacher which she did for forty years before retiring. Now she focuses on her foundation, which helps teach young people how to become activists in their own communities. She also has five sons.

Ahmet Ali Çelikten was one of the first black pilots in aviation history. There were just a few black pilots who fought in World War I – one from the United States, one from Jamaica, one from Martinique, and one from Eritrea. Ahmet was from Turkey, but his grandmother was enslaved in Nigeria and brought to the Ottoman Empire before he was born. His father was of African Turkish descent. Ahmet was born in 1883, and wanted to be a sailor. He entered Naval Technical School and graduated as a First Lieutenant in 1908, then taking aviation courses at the Naval Flight School in 1914, joining the Ottoman Air Force.

 

 

As World War I broke out, Ahmet married Hatice Hanim who was from Greece. He began serving in the military in 1916, and in 1917 travelled to Berlin for more flight training. There isn’t much else out there about him – he passed away in 1969 and his wife died in 1991, but there are some dashing pictures of him.

 

 

Ernestine de Lambriquet was the adopted daughter of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette. She was born in Versailles in 1778 to a servant of the king and a chamber maid. She looked kind of like the King as well as like his daughter Marie Therese, so people thought she might be the King’s illegitimate daughter. She was chosen by the Queen to be the Princess’s playmate, so she spent a lot of time with her. When her mother died in 1788, the King and Queen adopted her and gave her a pension of 12000 livres per year. She slept with Marie Therese, and was educated with her, treated as another royal child of France.

 

 

The King and Queen adopted several other children also. Armand was a poor orphan who was adopted along with his three older siblings in 1776, and Zoe was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents who worked for the king passed away. Jean Amilcar, a Senegalese slave boy, was originally given to the Queen as a present, but she freed him, baptized and adopted him, and gave him a pension as well. Out of the eight adopted children, only three of them actually lived with the family as royal children: Ernestine, Armand, and Zoe. The other children, including Jean Amilcar, just lived off of the Queen’s money until she was imprisoned during the French Revolution. (Unfortunately poor Jean Amilcar was evicted from his boarding school when the fees were no longer being paid and starved to death on the street).

 

 

As Ernestine was playmate of the Princess Marie-Therese, Zoe was a playmate of the Dauphin. She was sent away with her sisters to a convent boarding school before the French Revolution broke out. Armand lived with the royal family until the revolution, at which point he left because he had republican sympathies. Ernestine accompanied the royal family as they fled, at one point going off to live with her father in the countryside, and during the revolution she was taken care of the royal sub-governess de Soucy’s father’s family. She grew up and married Jean-Charles-Germain Prempain in 1810, and died three years later, with no children.

What makes Ernestine’s life even more interesting is that she swapped identities with the princess, Marie-Therese, during the tumultuous times in France during the revolution.  A lot of people were travelling with assumed names and pretending to be other people for their own safety during this time, so it could be true, at least historically speaking. The theory is that she became the ‘Dark Countess’ who lived in a castle in Germany, only going out in public with a veil over her face with a man named Leonardus known as the ‘Dark Count’. She died in 1837 and he died in 1845. However, DNA analysis in 2013 disproved this theory and the Dark Countess was not Princess Marie Therese. Still, mystery surrounds the story of Ernestine Lambriquet, which I personally find interesting and perfect for some kind of historical fiction.