Salynn McCollum

After her tenure with SNCC, McCollum took a job as a Day Care Center Director in Harlem for about twenty years. Then, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where she trained dogs, rode horses, and traveled. In 2000, she moved back to Tennessee where she lived with her sister, Rhonda McCollum and family, in Nunnelly, Tennessee. She died on May 1, 2014.

McCollum visited Highlander Folk School during her time in Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. In the beginning of 1962, McCollum began working full-time for SNCC in Atlanta. Her duties included handling voter registration in Georgia, fundraising, and public speaking at churches throughout the South. She did not attend the March on Washington because by that time she had developed a dislike of being in large unorganized crowds probably due to her experiences in Cairo, Illinois.

Mary Salynn (Selyn) McCollum was the only white female Freedom Rider during the leg from Nashville, Tennessee to Birmingham, Alabama on May 17, 1961.

McCollum attended training sessions led by Reverend James Lawson on non-violent protesting and also nightly meetings about desegregating downtown Nashville. The workshops were not tactical but instead focused on how to handle hostile citizens who opposed the student demonstrations. After the workshops and meetings, the college students would socialize and eat dinner at a restaurant on Jefferson Street. In February 1961, she attended a Nashville Student Movement meeting as a guest of Central Committee Member, Prof. Carr.

After graduation, she matriculated in 1958 at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee. Her course of study focused on instruction for intellectually and developmentally disabled students. Although she was an undergraduate, she took some graduate level courses. During one such course, she met a Fisk University professor, Lester Carr, who shared her interest in developmentally challenged children. Professor Carr invited McCollum to visit Fisk University to see a classroom of autistic children. He also invited her to come hear Kelly Miller Smith speak at First Baptist, Capitol Hill.

Born to Hilda and Walter McCollum in Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 6, 1940, her family moved around during her childhood. She eventually ended up in Amherst, New York where she attended junior high and high school. She has one sister named Rhonda. Though admitted to Syracuse University, McCollum's family wanted her to return to the South as both her parents were born and raised in Tennessee.