M. J. O'Brien
AUTHOR

M. J. O'Brien

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M. J. O’Brien is an independent author who writes about issues related to civil rights and progressive politics. "We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth's Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired" was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2013. O’Brien forged an interest in nonviolent social change during his undergraduate days as a Catholic seminarian at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Catonsville, Maryland, where he studied the philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day and where he marched, along with many of his classmates, with Caesar Chavez from Baltimore to Washington to agitate for better working conditions for migrant farm workers. Graduating in 1973, O’Brien went on to earn a second degree in Communication/Journalism from The American University in Washington, DC. In 1977, O’Brien met Joan Trumpauer (Mulholland), an unassuming single mother of five. In time, Trumpauer would share with O’Brien her harrowing experiences as a Freedom Rider and civil rights worker in Mississippi in the early 1960s. Her story nudged O’Brien to delve deeper into the history of the Mississippi movement, where he uncovered the story of the Jackson Woolworth’s sit-in (May 28 1963) in which Trumpauer was a key figure. O’Brien took it upon himself to find every surviving demonstrator from that now-iconic sit-in. Additionally, he searched for newsmen, police, and even harassing crowd members to form a complete picture of what happened on that historic day and during the dramatic and tragic three weeks that followed. “We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth’s Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired” was published by the University Press of Mississippi. It would win a Lillian Smith Book Award in 2014. At a 50th anniversary event for the Jackson Woolworht’s sit-in, O’Brien met Sam Bradford, one of the Tougaloo Nine—a group of nine Tougaloo College students who staged Mississippi’s first student-led sit in on March 27, 1961. Bradford urged O’Brien to write a book about their historic demonstration “We were the first,” he noted. In 2025, The University Press of Mississippi published O’Brien’s “The Tougaloo Nine: The Jackson Library Sit-In at the Crossroads of Civil War and Civil Rights.” In it, O’Brien recounts three history-making days for the City of Jackson, when civil rights demonstrators would pre-empt Civil War Centennial commemorations, thus pitting those looking forward to a more multicultural society against those looking to a bygone, mythic past. “The Tougaloo Nine” won the Mississippi Historical Society’s 2026 Book of the Year Award, which cited its “thorough research and exemplary storytelling.”
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