Muriel Tillinghast is a lifelong activist. Her recent initiatives with National Ethical Service have seeded the Ethical Working Group on Children’s Rights, which has united activists from the NGO Committee on Children’s Rights/NY with organizers of the Ethical Culture movement to activate around the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
She is a trustee and member of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture and the Founder of Lucy’s Children. She is a former recipient of the NES Rose Walker Grant for her work with Haiti. She was a 2021 Honoree of the Clara Lemlich Awards, by Labor Arts.
During the Freedom Summer in 1964, as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Ms. Tillinghast was one of three female project directors in the state of Mississippi. Later, she headed state operations out of Jackson, MS and regional administrative work at SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, GA.
Following Muriel Tillinghast’s involvement in SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement, she has remained an advocate for human and civil rights. In the 1970s, she became a tenured instructor at the Atlanta University School of Social Work. Since then, she has worked extensively on issues of tenant rights and prison education through her role as an administrator in New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and as a prison educational administrator at the Brooklyn House of Detention and Rikers Island.[2]
In 1996, Tillinghast was selected as the New York Green Party candidate for vice president alongside Ralph Nader.