IC News

On September 28, during Ithaca College’s Day of Learning Series, the college hosted a trio of speakers who spoke to students about how they can have an impact when facing injustice.

The topic of the discussion was “Students as Advocates and Change Agents,” and the speakers were: Luvaghn Brown, a civil rights activist who was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a Civil Rights organization founded in 1960; Civil Rights icon Joan Triphammer Mulholland; and her son, Emmy-award winning filmmaker Loki Mulholland ’93.

Hosted by President La Jerne Terry Cornish, the Day of Learning was held to bring issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging into conversation on campus and within the community.

“The work of Luvaghn, Loki, and Joan is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s, and we are fortunate that these advocates have joined us tonight to share their insights on we can activate our capacity to be agents of change in own community,” Cornish said. “We felt that we had struck a blow, and we were committed to doing something else,” he told the audience. “And through all of that. I was not afraid. What I was doing was right.”

Each of the panelists shared their history with the Civil Rights movement. Brown, a black man who was born and raised in Mississippi, got involved in the movement more gradually, saying that the rhetoric of groups like the Freedom Riders “didn’t resonate with me at first because they were talking about nonviolence, and nobody in the South practiced nonviolence. We killed each other.”

By the age of 16, he was participating in non-violent protests. In 1960, he and a friend were arrested for sitting at a whites-only counter of a Woolworth’s department store in the segregated town of Jackson, Mississippi. The incident deepened his involvement with the movement.

“We felt that we had struck a blow, and we were committed to doing something else,” he told the audience. “And through all of that. I was not afraid. What I was doing was right.”

As a speaker for Facing History, a non-profit organization focused on bringing conversations on bigotry and discrimination into classrooms, Brown has spent recent years visiting schools around the country and speaking to students about advocacy.

“It was doing this that I realized I needed to tell the students who I was, not what I did, but the town I grew up in, where I came from,” Brown said. “This is where I came from, and this is what I do now. I got to where I did; you can do that, too.”

“There are so many ways that people can make a difference,” he said. “For instance, simply saying, ‘No, it’s wrong to do that,’ is revolutionary. Put your arms around somebody who’s being picked on by other people, that’s revolutionary. Allow yourself to do that. You can find out where your place is. Don’t stop, keep doing what you’re doing.”

Joan Mulholland was a white student at Duke University during the time of segregation in the South, and growing up, her environment was not conducive to Civil Rights advocacy.

“I was oblivious to segregation. Folks just didn’t talk about it. White folks. Folks around me,” she said.

As the Civil Rights movement ramped up and the Freedom Riders became more influential it became impossible not to see the effect that segregation was having on life in the South. As she become more involved, she and Brown met, and a friendship developed. By the time she was 23, Joan Mulholland had participated in more than 50 sit-ins.

In 2014 Joan Mulholland and other female Freedom Riders were recognized by President Barack Obama, and a year later, received the 2015 National Civil Rights Museum Freedom Award. She laid out her three steps to spark change, while also encouraging students not to become complacent.

“Find the problem, get together with other folks who see that it’s a problem, and take action,” she said. “We see [racism] in so many other places—where the highways are, where the grocery stores are —we’ve come a mighty long way, but we still have a long way to go. We’re the past. You are the future.”

Joan Mulholland’s son, Loki Mulholland, is an award-winning filmmaker, whose 2017 documentary “The Uncomfortable Truth” highlights the work of Brown and others.

Loki Mulholland broke the topic of advocacy down into small bits called “somethings,” and emphasized to students the importance of finding theirs and pursuing it.

He credited his time in the Roy H. Park School of Communications with helping him find his ‘something’, saying: “The ‘something’ that I do is what I learned here at Ithaca, in the film school. We all have something we can do we just have to be willing to do it.”