Jo Townson was interviewed by Anna Robinson-Sweet via Zoom video conference on April 26, 2019. Townson talks about her early life in California, student activism, and her career in public health. The majority of the interview is dedicated to her involvement in the Mobilization for Real Diversity, Democracy, and Economic Justice, a student-led protest movement at The New School calling for economic justice and diversity at the university. Townson opens the interview speaking about her early life. She describes growing up in the Bay Area of Northern California, attending an alternative high school, and early activism. Townson recounts moving to New York in 1994 to attend Eugene Lang College. Townson remembers taking a course with M. Jacqui Alexander, an Afro-Caribbean educator, social theorist, and activist, and how this course inspired her involvement in the Mobilization. She describes how the Mobilization, first motivated by Alexander’s employment insecurity at The New School, grew to a series of demands surrounding the university’s recruitment and retention of faculty of color, gender pay equity, and the school’s tacit upholding of heterosexual norms. Townson describes the demands as aimed at administrators, and in particular then-President Jonathan F. Fanton. Townson briefly touches on the media’s coverage of the Mobilization and the movement’s connection to similar protests across the country. Townson struggles to recount what happened to the Mobilization after she left Lang, saying she believed most of the “key people” either dropped out or graduated. Townson closes the interview talking about her brief stint in documentary filmmaking and the overlap between her early activism and her current work in public health.