When she was a freshman at Duke University, where her mother insisted she go, the chaplain invited student demonstrators to speak. At the end of the conversation, in which they discussed the Civil Rights Movement in legal and moral terms, they asked her to join them.

"So that led to the picket lines, and then it led to the lunch counters and the jail and courtroom." Soon after, she dropped out of Duke, and as she watched students Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes attempt to integrate the University of Georgia under court order, she found inspiration. "They were met with riots and tear gas and being taken off in squad cars and stuff. And I thought this was not integration. Integration has to be a two-way street. Maybe I should apply to a colored college." After talking the idea over with the leadership of SNCC, they agreed. "And then somebody said, if you're going to do it, you may as well go to Mississippi because those students haven't done sit-ins yet. Maybe you can help 'em get started." And so she did.

Mulholland applied to Tougaloo College, where she got an up-close and personal experience with some of the movement's leaders, including Dr. King and Medgar Evers. "It was the center of the Civil Rights Movement for the state of Mississippi. Anybody who was coming down
to work for civil rights came through here." Inspired by the work in and around Jackson, Mulholland became a part of history as one of the Woolworth's Three - alongside Tougaloo professor John Salter and Anne Moody (author of Coming of Age In Mississippi).

She recalls, "I wasn't even supposed to be part of that. I was supposed to be a spotter for a picket line down the street, a distraction for the police while the folks got seated at the lunch counter. We decided we'd go down there and see what was happening." After Memphis Norman, a fellow Tougaloo student, was pulled from his seat and violently assaulted, Mulholland stepped up. "I ended up taking this empty seat at the lunch counter. And it was, well, I didn't waste any energy on being afraid. I say that distracts your brain from what you need to be thinking on, and fear can get you killed." She remembers the high school students starting to show up for lunch, furious that the counter was closed. "They started hassling us and trying to outdo each other and what they could do to us, and we tried to ignore them. We were cracking jokes and teasing Professor Salter, and sometimes we were holding hands and praying and things like that, but we were just enduring." For three hours, they endured. Together.

On a recent visit to Jackson, Mulholland noted, "Over the years, Jackson has become a really different city. Well, physically, buildings torn down and other ones put in. And the old Woolworth lunch counter where I sat-in is gone. But man, the most amazing thing to me is that the first state-sponsored Civil Rights museum in the United States is in Jackson, Mississippi. We aren't what we used to be down here. And it's hard to believe, but it's true."

"We have come a mighty long way, but we still have a mighty long way to go."