The donor, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, attended the September 18, 1963, funeral of three of the four girls killed in the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. She picked up these glass shards from the church?s stained glass windows from the street in front of the church.
She later recalled her response to the bombing coming just days after the March on Washington, ?It was just shattering to go from the euphoria of having this huge, huge march in Washington to those kids being killed. We?d felt the nation had reached a new high of civility with the March on Washington, and then to be brought down so hard. No matter how good it felt in Washington, the reality of the South was still there. That ugliness and violence hadn?t gone anywhere.? (Quoted in M. J. O?Brien, We Shall Not be Moved, University Press of Mississippi, 2013)
Trumpauer, her surname at the time, was a young white woman from Virginia who had participated in desegregation protests in Durham, North Carolina, in 1960 while a freshman at Duke University. After leaving Duke, she worked with the National Action Group (NAG) at Howard University and participated in the Freedom Rides, was arrested and served time in Parchman Prison in Mississippi in 1961. She was the first white student to attend all-black Tougaloo University full-time. She worked for SNCC and CORE in Mississippi while attending Tougaloo and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. ? William S. Pretzer, Senior Curator of History
