Trella Ann Laughlin July 20, 2022

On July 20, 2022, Trella Ann Laughlin died in her Mill Hollow home in Eureka Springs.

Found on her computer was the question, “How does one write the entire story of an 85-year-old know-it-all uppity Southern dyke? With difficulty.”

Trella was born in a time and place that formed her loves, passions, language, and the tradition of telling a story based on truth and decorated for the pleasure of listening.  

Jackson, Mississippi, in 1937 is where Trella was born to John Laughlin and Trella Mae Burnham Laughlin. Trella died when Trella Ann was eight months old.

Like most white children of the time, Trella was reared by an African American woman, Mrs. Daisy Rudd, the first of many women she loved. Before the end of segregation and the Civil Rights Bill, she attended grade and high school in Jackson, deeply sensitized to the need for social change, and the work and pain that would take.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, she attended and graduated from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, followed by a getting double masters’ degrees from Stanford. While in California she also found and participated in the women’s movement, music, rebellions against the status quo, the nascent drug culture, and the struggles for equality among races.

In 1968 she joined the University of Maryland, Overseas Division, where she met her spouse, Marie Howard, in Turkey where they both taught.

During her last year in Europe, she travelled with a backpack and camera.

In the 1970s, she returned to the United States and joined other women who were looking for land and communal living, for a place to live freely and without judgment. She lived in various towns in British Columbia, Arkansas, Texas, and probably other places. During those years she learned the value of love and political movements, and her belief in the struggles and the value of the working classes.

In the 1980s she returned to Texas where she taught at Austin Community College until she got a grant from Genevieve Vaughn to document the work of the Nicaraguan people achieving free elections. Trella rapidly became a television expert at ACTV, and through Gen’s society, travelled the world with her heavy cameras and her need to capture the parts and people that were often ignored. Her program, Let the People Speak, won awards and was broadcast throughout the United States and Canada.

In the 1990s she retired from her camera and Austin, and moved to Arkansas with Marie Howard, and lived in Eureka Springs where she continued her efforts to create a better, fairer society with love, music and the truth.

Trella always carried that need for change and truth. She said what she thought whether it was popular or not. This can be seen by the stickers on her old Subaru, her front door at 239 Mill Hollow, the refrigerator doors, the letters she wrote, the marches she attended, and the t-shirt she wore.

There is no doubt she is missed. There will be a farewell party this fall where we can get together and exchange Trella stories.

In the meantime, for anyone who wishes to do something in her memory: donations to the NAACP; Lesbian Connections, or some good workable idea of what to do with 600+ three-quarter broadcast tapes from Let the People Speak.

She is survived by her wife, Marie Howard, her cousin Diane Laughlin of Atlanta, Georgia, and a world that is not quite the same without her.

Marie Howard