Minnijean Brown-Trickey

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Minnijean Brown-Trickey (born September 11, 1941)^[1] was one of a group of African-American teenagers known as the "Little Rock Nine." On September 25, 1957, under the gaze of 1,200 armed soldiers and a worldwide audience, Minnijean Brown-Trickey faced down an angry mob and helped to desegregate Central High. She was later expelled from Little Rock Central High School in 1958 for several reasons, among them an incident in which she dropped her tray which had chili on it and the chili splattered on the white students in the cafeteria where they had been verbally abusing her. The chili incident was a clear expression of the meeting to stop integration and get one of the Little Rock Nine expelled.

This seminal event in to American history was just the beginning of Brown-Trickey's long career as a crusader for civil rights. She has spent her life fighting for the rights of minority groups and the dispossessed. For her work, she has received the Congressional Gold Medal, the Wolf Award, the Spingarn Medal, and many other citations and awards. Under the Clinton administration, she served for a time as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior responsible for diversity. Currently, she lives in Maryland, and is continuing her work for civil rights and social equality. She is also working on her autobiography, tentatively entitled Mixed Blessing: Living Black in North America.

She lived in Canada for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, getting involved in First Nations activism and studying social work at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. A documentary film about Brown-Trickey entitled Journey to Little Rock: The Untold Story of Minnijean Brown Trickey (2002) was produced by North-East Pictures in Ottawa, where Brown-Trickey lived during the 1990s. In 2007, Laurentian also honoured Trickey with an honorary doctorate of laws. ^[2]

Brown-Trickey has moved back to Little Rock, and resides there with her mother and sister. Her daughter Spirit Trickey also resides in Little Rock, and is employed at Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, where she interprets her mother's, and the other eight students' struggle to enter Central. Since Brown was one of the Little Rock Nine, she used to be a clear benefactor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and persisted in her fight for justice. Now, Brown educates many children, visiting schools and other public places.

[edit] References

One Of The Nine Black Children Who Dared To Enter The Little Rock Central High School Was Minnijean Brown Trickey, One Of The Middle Children. Fifty years ago, black youngsters’ struggles to attend Little Rock’s Central High School during the 1957-1958 school year propelled the civil rights movement forward in the United States. (See “After Facing Mobs 50 Years Ago, Nine Go Home to Honors.”) The Little Rock Nine’s story is really nine stories.

“When I was young, almost 50 years ago, I knew it was important,” Minnijean Brown Trickey said of her enrollment at Central High School.

But while aware of a deeper purpose, to bring racial equality to Little Rock’s schools, Trickey also had a normal teenager’s interests. “I just thought, ‘It’s a big school. It’s in my neighborhood. It’s there. I should go,’” she said. “We all felt good. We knew that Central High School had so many more courses, and dramatics and speech and tennis courts and a big, beautiful stadium.”

The premier school, known for its size and academic excellence, had been named “America’s Most Beautiful High School” by the American Institute of Architects.

And today? “I am fascinated by how unprotected we really were and how big it was” to go to Central, she said.

Ernest Green knows what Trickey means. He said that, as he has aged, he slowly has realized what an important role he had as a teenager in American history. “When I die, my epitaph will probably be, ‘one of the Little Rock Nine,’” he said.

Minnijean Brown in 1957 (© AP Images)Several of the nine have children who, through their work, bear witness to the parents’ roles. Green has a son who is a professor of African-American history at New York University. Trickey’s daughter Spirit works as a park ranger at the Central High visitor center. (See “Little Rock Nine Member and Daughter Relive Struggle, Victory.”)

Trickey is remembered as the one whom white bullies drove out. (They passed out cards and put up signs that said, “One down, eight to go.”) She was suspended in December 1957 for dumping her bowl of chili on a white boy who blocked her way in the cafeteria, and expelled in February, for calling a girl “white trash” after the girl taunted her and hit her with a purse. Trickey finished high school in New York

“These people had to endure torment and respond with perfect behavior,” historian Taylor Branch said. “Ten years later, in 1966, the Black Power Movement was a revolt against saying, ‘Fairness in America means blacks have to be superhuman, that they have to endure like [baseball player] Jackie Robinson and the Little Rock Nine did.’”

Trickey graduated from college in Canada and raised several children there. She home-schooled the older ones until high school. “We think we can protect kids from the real world, but we can’t,” she said. When her children were young, Trickey did not tell them explicitly about Little Rock. “It didn’t make sense to me then, and it doesn’t now. I am never going to say it made sense.”

She said, however, that she learns from Spirit, who has a different perspective. “She interprets the world for me in a different way.”

Trickey has worked as a teacher, social worker and activist. Today she takes teenagers on tours of civil rights landmarks. Even though she might not have spoken to her own children about her high school experiences, she now calls the Little Rock crisis “a beautiful story in some ways. I wish every child knew it.”

She quotes author James Baldwin, who said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

[edit] External links

• Minnijean Brown-Trickey Speaker Page at The Lavin Agency