MinniJean and the Reflection of Self (Little Rock Nine)

I got to have dinner with MinniJean and we ordered the same cocktail and laughed at the same ratchet jokes and she spoke her WHOLE mind.  It reminded me to not be silenced by anyone despite adversity.  Although I am tired of constant policing of my voice and my body and my broken health I thank G-d for allowing me to have these moments of clarity.  In Peace a Voice comes through and reminds me that I am not alone even when I feel alone.  There is this 74 year old activist still rocking and making a difference in the world.  She is unbossed.  Lord let me walk like that. And not wait until I am older and more tired to do so.

Minnijean Brown Trickey made history as one of the Little Rock Nine, the nine African-American students whodesegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The world watched as they braved constant intimidation and threats from those who opposed desegregation of the formerly all-white high school.

Minnijean Brown, the eldest of four children of Willie and Imogene Brown, was born on September 11, 1941, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Her mother was a homemaker and nurse’s aid during the crisis, and her father was an independent mason and landscaping contractor. She is the sister of the late Bobby Brown, who was the president ofBlack United Youth (BUY) in Arkansas in the late 1960s.

Although all of the Nine experienced verbal and physical harassment during the 1957–58 academic year at Central, Trickey was first suspended, and then expelled, for retaliating against the daily torment: specifically, she called one of her tormenters “white trash.” On February 17, 1958, she moved to New York and lived with Drs. Kenneth B. and Mamie Clark, African-American psychologists whose social science research formed the basis for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argument in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, which held that segregation harmed the self-esteem of African-American children. She graduated from New York’s New Lincoln School, a private progressive school in Manhattan, in 1959.

Brown married Roy Trickey, a fisheries biologist, on September 21, 1967; they have six children. She attended Southern Illinois University and majored in journalism. She later moved to Canada with her husband, where she received a BSW in Native Human Services from Laurentian University and an MSW in social work from Carleton University in Ontario, Canada. The couple divorced in the mid-1980s.

Trickey is a social activist and has worked on behalf of peacemaking, environmental issues, developing youth leadership, diversity education and training, cross-cultural communication, and gender and social justice advocacy. She served in the Clinton administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Workforce Diversity at the Department of the Interior from 1999 to 2001. She has taught social work at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada and in various community colleges in Canada.