Juneteenth Project Coalition

08/30/2026

Never Forget🙏🏾

07/29/2026

"I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetrate it."

While teaching, Abel continued to write poems. In the 1930’s he saw a gruesome photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana and expressed his revulsion with a new poem, “Bitter Fruit,” which first appeared in the Teachers’ Union publication, The New York Teacher, in early 1937. Abel changed the title to “Strange Fruit” and set the poem to music in November of 1938. Anne Meeropol sang and played it on her nylon string guitar at Teachers’ Union events at the end of that year and in early 1939.

Later that year Abel played his new song for Billie Holiday at Cafe Society in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where she was performing. Cafe Society was the only integrated night club in the city. Dubbed “the right place for the wrong people,” it spoofed the airs of the rich and famous.

Billie agreed to perform the song as her last number of the evening. All service was stopped while she sang so that there would be silence. When she finished, the stage lights were extinguished for dramatic effect. According to reports, the audience was so stunned at the end of her first performance that no one made a sound. Then one person started clapping and that became a sustained ovation.

"I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetrate it." — Abel Meeropol

07/10/2026

Thank You So Much❤️

07/10/2026

Remember Those Who Fought With US✊🏾

She was a white Southern girl descended from slave owners — raised by a mother who believed in segregation. At nineteen, she threw all of that away, and it landed her on death row. And that was only the beginning of what she was willing to lose...

Her name was Joan Trumpauer, and she grew up in Arlington, Virginia, on the comfortable side of every line the segregated South had drawn.

Her family had once owned slaves in Georgia. Her mother was a staunch segregationist. Everything about Joan's world was arranged to reward her for looking away — to keep her safe, protected, and silent inside a system built for people who looked like her. The path in front of her was the easy one: finish school, marry well, live quietly, never make trouble.

But Joan couldn't stop seeing what that comfort was built on. Raised in the church, she kept colliding with the unbearable contradiction between what she'd been taught about justice and the injustice she watched every day. And at some point she made a decision that would cost her nearly everything: she would no longer stand on the comfortable side of it.

In 1961, at nineteen, she joined the Freedom Riders.

Their idea sounded almost mundane. Black and white Americans would ride interstate buses together and use the same waiting rooms and counters, regardless of race. No weapons, no threats — just a refusal to obey laws built on inequality.

In 1961, that refusal could get you killed. Freedom Riders were beaten in broad daylight, buses firebombed, mobs waiting at stations with chains and clubs.

Joan knew all of it. She boarded the bus anyway.

When she reached Jackson, Mississippi, she was arrested almost immediately. And then she was offered the easy way out that would follow her for years: pay the fine, leave Mississippi, go home, forget the whole thing.

She refused.

So they sent her to Parchman Farm — the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a place designed not merely to punish people but to break them. And here is a detail that tells you everything about what she endured: because Parchman had no women's wing, nineteen-year-old Joan was held in a cell on death row, crammed in with seventeen other women.

She spent about two months there. The heat was suffocating. The guards leaned on psychological cruelty as much as physical confinement, subjecting the women to invasive, degrading "examinations" designed purely to show they could do anything they wanted. They were making clear, Joan said, that they had total power — and probably would use it.

And through all of it, the guards reminded her of the one thing they thought she'd forgotten: she was white. Unlike the Black prisoners beside her, she could leave anytime — she only had to say she was sorry.

She never did.

Most people, after Parchman, would have gone home. Joan went deeper.

She dropped out of Duke and enrolled at Tougaloo College in Jackson — the first white student at the historically Black school. Her reasoning was pure, defiant logic: if whites would riot over Black students integrating white colleges, what would they do about a white student integrating a Black one? At Tougaloo she worked alongside Medgar Evers, met Martin Luther King Jr., roomed with the writer Anne Moody, and became the first white member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Her family couldn't understand it. Threatening letters arrived. And to the segregationists of Mississippi, her real crime was never simply breaking their laws — it was choosing empathy over the privilege she'd been handed at birth.

Then came May 28, 1963 — and the moment that would put her face in history books.

Joan was one of roughly fourteen activists who staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth's in downtown Jackson. Anne Moody was there. So was professor John Salter, and chaplain Ed King. They sat down. They ordered food. That was all.

What followed became one of the most violent sit-ins of the entire Civil Rights Movement. A mob surrounded them and, for nearly three hours, unleashed everything it had. A Black student, Memphis Norman, was dragged to the floor and beaten by a former policeman. Salter was burned with ci******es and hit with brass knuckles. The crowd screamed "communist" and worse, and a man pointed straight at Joan and called her a "race traitor." They poured ketchup, mustard, sugar, and spray paint over the activists' heads, spat on them, and punched them.

The police stood nearby and watched. No one stepped in.

And a photographer named Fred Blackwell captured it — three people at a lunch counter, dripping with condiments, ringed by faces contorted with hate, refusing to move. The picture went around the world. It became one of the defining images of the movement, because it showed something no argument could: that sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is simply refuse to get up.

The danger only escalated. Three weeks after Woolworth's, Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway. The next year, Joan briefed a young activist named Michael Schwerner on how to survive as a white organizer in Mississippi — one day before Schwerner was kidnapped and murdered alongside Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.

And one night in 1964, on a dark road near Canton, the Ku Klux Klan surrounded the car Joan was riding in and beat the driver. They escaped. She later learned the Klan had meant to kill her that night — and when they failed, they murdered three other activists instead.

She kept going anyway. She helped organize the March on Washington. She was arrested again and again — taking part, over the years, in dozens of sit-ins and demonstrations. She never stopped showing up.

Eventually Joan Trumpauer Mulholland became a teacher, spending decades in the classroom before founding a foundation to teach young people about the movement. Now in her eighties, she still speaks to students across America. And when they ask where she found the courage, her answer is disarmingly plain: she never thought of herself as especially brave. She simply knew what was right — and once you truly know a thing is right, she says, pretending you don't becomes impossible.

She summed up her whole life in a single sentence, back in 1963: "I'm trying to help America become what it says it is."

She wasn't forced into any of it. She was never denied a single right she risked her life to win for others. She could have lived a comfortable, quiet life and lost nothing.

Instead, at nineteen, she crossed the line she'd been warned her whole life never to cross. And she never crossed back.

Her story leaves a question for the rest of us. When we see injustice in our own time — and it costs something to say so — which side of the line are we standing on? Had you ever heard of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland before today? Tell us below, and share her name forward. The quiet ones who refuse to look away deserve to be remembered too.

06/19/2026

05/09/2026

On August 20, 1965, four young civil rights activists walked through the stifling Alabama heat to buy cold drinks at a local store. Minutes earlier, they had been released from six days in jail for picketing Whites-only stores in Fort Deposit. They were thirsty, tired, and stranded -- the jailers had let them go without explanation, transportation, or a phone call. The streets of Hayneville felt wrong. Ruby Sales, a 17-year-old Tuskegee student, would remember an eerie stillness, not a Black face anywhere.

They walked to Varner's Cash Store, a place they had visited before. They never made it inside.

Tom Coleman, a part-time deputy sheriff and white supremacist, was waiting in the doorway with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He yelled at the group, Ruby later recounted: "The store is closed. If you don't get off this goddamn property, I'm going to blow your damn brains out."

What happened next took only seconds. Coleman pointed his gun at Ruby. Jonathan Daniels, a 26-year-old White seminarian from New Hampshire, grabbed the back of her shirt, pulling her down. The shotgun blast caught him full in the chest. He died instantly.

Coleman fired again, hitting Father Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, in the back as he shielded 19-year-old Joyce Bailey while they ran away. Morrisroe collapsed, crying for water in the August heat. Coleman stood over his body with the shotgun, daring anyone to help him.

Ruby Sales, covered in Jonathan's blood, thought she was dead. It would take her seven months to start speaking again.

"I saw the best and the worst of White men," she would say later, "in the same moment."

Jonathan Myrick Daniels had not planned to be in Alabama that summer. He was a seminary student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing for ordination in the Episcopal Church -- a kid from Keene, New Hampshire, who had been valedictorian at Virginia Military Institute, who loved theater and poetry, who was known even as a child for being the first to stand up for anyone who wasn't being treated fairly.

But in March 1965, like millions of Americans, Jonathan watched the footage of Bloody Sunday -- state troopers beating and tear-gassing peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as they demanded the right to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for clergy of all faiths from around the country to come to Alabama and join the fight for voting rights.

Jonathan answered. He intended to stay for a weekend. He stayed for five months.

In Selma, he moved in with a Black family, the Wests. He worked to integrate the local Episcopal church, which had been turning away Black worshippers at the door. He tutored children. Helped families apply for federal aid. Registered voters. He did the quiet, dangerous, daily work of the movement in Lowndes County -- a place they called "Bloody Lowndes," where no Black citizen had been allowed to vote in the twentieth century, where Viola Liuzzo, a White civil rights activist from Detroit, had been murdered by the Klan just months before.

Ruby Sales had joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager. She and Jonathan became friends and co-workers that summer, two young people united by the same commitment in the same deadly place.

On August 14, they were arrested together as part of a group picketing Whites-only stores. They were hauled to the Hayneville jail in a garbage truck. For six days they sat in sweltering cells -- no air conditioning, temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, toilets backing sewage onto the floor.

On August 20 -- Jonathan's mother's birthday -- the jailers suddenly released them. It was the last day of his life.

Tom Coleman was charged with manslaughter -- not murder. At trial, his defense claimed Jonathan had a knife and Father Morrisroe had a gun. No weapons were ever found. What Morrisroe actually held in his hand was a dime. The all-White jury deliberated less than ninety minutes. Not guilty. Coleman never served a day. He died in 1997, a free man.

Despite death threats against her and her family, the seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales testified at his trial. She was determined, she said, to speak for Jonathan because he was dead and couldn't speak for himself. Then she kept going.

In the decades that followed, Ruby became one of the most important voices of the Civil Rights Movement -- and one of its most profound theologians. She earned degrees from Tuskegee, Manhattanville College, and Princeton University. And then she made a choice that would have surprised no one who knew her: she enrolled at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- the same seminary Jonathan Daniels had attended. She graduated in 1998 with a Master of Divinity.

She founded the SpiritHouse Project in Atlanta, a nonprofit organization dedicated to his memory, using art, spirituality, and education to fight for racial and social justice. Starting in 2007, the SpiritHouse Project documented over 2,000 state-sanctioned killings of Black Americans. Ninety-eight percent of them were unarmed.

Ruby Sales is seventy-seven years old now. She is one of fifty civil rights leaders featured in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her 2019 TED Talk, "How We Can Start to Heal the Pain of Racial Division," has been viewed nearly two million times.

Her message is not what you might expect from someone who watched a friend murdered in front of her by a white supremacist.

She speaks of the "spiritual crisis of White America" -- of the forty-five-year-old he**in addict in Appalachia who feels erased, of White people who have lost all sense of meaning and identity. She calls for a "liberating white theology" that helps people find genuine humanity -- not through domination, but through connection. And she asks a question she learned to ask in the movement, one she believes we have lost the ability to ask in public life: "Where does it hurt?"

"I didn't carry his death as a burden of guilt," Ruby Sales has said of Jonathan Daniels. "I carried it as a commitment."

Jonathan Daniels was twenty-six years old when he died. He never got to become a priest. Never got to marry, have children, grow old. Never got to see the Voting Rights Act change the South, or the first Black president, or Ruby Sales become everything she became.

But in the last second of his life, he saw a man with a gun pointed at a seventeen-year-old girl. And he acted.

The Episcopal Church designated Jonathan Daniels a martyr in 1991. His name is carved at the Washington National Cathedral, alongside Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks. At the Virginia Military Institute, a memorial arch and courtyard honor his memory; the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award has been given to President Jimmy Carter and Congressman John Lewis. In 2026, he was named patron of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.

But perhaps the most fitting memorial is simpler than any of these.

It is Ruby Sales -- still alive, still speaking, still asking: Where does it hurt? It is the life she built from the one he gave her.

"I was glad that I met Jonathan," she once said, "because it helped me understand that White people are not one-dimensional, that they are also constrained by the system of white supremacy."

In a doorway in Alabama, in the summer of 1965, Ruby Sales saw a White man point a shotgun at her face and pull the trigger. And she saw another White man step in front of it.

"One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry," said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "was performed by Jonathan Daniels."

The best and the worst. In the same moment.

We face the same choice every day. Rarely so lethal. But always the same: stand up or look away.

---

For an extraordinary, in-depth history of this tumultuous period, we recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," which opens with Selma and covers Lowndes County, at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780684857138 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3QGPFfu (Amazon)

To introduce tweens and teens to the riveting story of Jonathan Daniels and Ruby Sales, we highly recommend "Blood Brother: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights" for ages 11 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781629797489 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4w2juXR (Amazon)

For adult readers seeking a deeper scholarly account, we recommend "Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama" at https://amzn.to/4vYWJEt

To introduce younger readers to the Selma voting rights struggle, we recommend "Child of the Civil Rights Movement" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/child-of-the-civil-rights-movement) and "Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March" for 12 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/turning-15-on-the-road-to-freedom)

To introduce children and teens to more courageous women who helped lead the fight for equality, we've shared many reading recommendations in our blog post, "50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177

To listen to Ruby Sales' powerful TED talk "How We Can Start to Heal the Pain of Racial Division," visit https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_sales_how_we_can_start_to_heal_the_pain_of_racial_division

05/05/2026

Awesomeness! Congratulations Queen

Demetria Coley, 18, has become the youngest nursing graduate in Florida State University history after earning her degree on May 1, 2026.

04/23/2026

🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

04/21/2026

💐Teonia Stokes (22): Seven months pregnant, shot.
💐Gladys Johnson (22): Pregnant, burned in her home.
💐Daneshia Heller: Shot and left by a dumpster.
💐Victoria Alexander (38): Nurse, shot by her estranged husband at work.
💐Dr. Cerina Fairfax: Dentist, former Virginia second lady, killed by her ex-husband.
💐Gabryel Ayers (26): Shot in her car with her 1-year-old child present.
💐Raven Edwards (34): Shot with her 10-year-old daughter.
💐Bianca Huntley (34): Gunned down on an Atlanta highway.
💐Imani Dia Smith (26): Broadway child star (Lion King), stabbed.
💐Qualeisha Barnes (Siditty) (36): Rapper, 14 weeks pregnant, shot.
💐Ashanti Allen (23): Eight months pregnant, murdered by a former partner.
💐Nancy Metayer Bowen: Florida vice mayor and environmental scientist.
💐Ashlee Jenae (31): Influencer found dead in Zanzibar while on vacation.