William and Julia Moulden attended Sunday Mass at Villanova regularly. During the week, William worked the couple’s farm in Radnor. Julia cooked, cleaned, and washed clothes for the white students and priests at the college. 1/11
On Sundays they did not work for others; they dressed in their best to attend Mass. As a Black couple walking into an all-white church—Julia and William turned heads. Especially when Julia wore a striking green silk dress to mark the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day. 2/11
Julia and William Moulden made a striking couple walking arm-in-arm into the church. Julia in her green dress walking with William, who wore a matching silk rose on his jacket lapel and a ribbon around his hat. 3/11
Years later, students remembered the couple on Sundays—not for the work they did on all of the other days. The Mouldens were unforgettable. 4/11
Julia was there from Villanova’s beginning. She began working for the college at its start and tended to the needs of the priests and the students for decades. 5/11
She remembered the Rudolph farm, and when Fr. Thomas Middleton wrote the first history of the school, he turned to Julia because she had been there. Middleton’s history was published in 1893; it has served as the official history of the college’s founding ever since. 6/11
In it, Middleton erased the crucial role Julia played in the school’s history and reduced William and Julia to minor characters in the founding and survival of the college. Since then, William has been nearly forgotten and Julia entirely so. 7/11
The story that is told about Villanova’s founding is about white, male priests who purchased land and built a school that, despite the odds, survives today. But that story is incomplete. 8/11
If the Mouldens appear in that story, they are “the Main Line’s first Black Catholics” or they lived on “Mt. Misery,” but that’s not who they were. William was an enterprising and resourceful businessman-farmer. Julia worked for the white priests and boys at the college. 9/11
On Sundays, however, Julia was not defined by her work but instead by the joy and the pleasure she took in wearing a bright green silk dress on a special occasion. 10/11
On this July 4th weekend, the Rooted Project is celebrating the life, memory, and exquisite sense of style of Julia and William Moulden, a founding couple of Villanova University. 11/11 #BlackWomensHistory #BlackWomenMatter 
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
