Social activist, educator and one of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown Trickey will present “Return to Little Rock” for the Women’s Society annual Adele Starbird Lecture in the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. April 11 in Graham Chapel.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the event that made Brown Trickey part of American history.
In September 1957, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. the Board of Education case that racial segregation was unconstitutional, Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., remained segregated.
Gov. Orval Faubus employed the Arkansas National Guard to enforce segregation by surrounding the school, barring entrance to nine African-American students.
For three weeks, the Little Rock Nine, as the students became known, attempted to attend classes. But it wasn’t until President Eisenhower called on U.S. Army troops to escort the students into school that that goal was met.
Brown Trickey was one of those students. She suffered vicious harassment and humiliating attacks from white students. When she reacted to the insults by dumping food on her assailants, she was expelled from school. Fearing for her safety, her parents sent her to live in New York.
She graduated from high school in 1959 and went on to attend Southern Illinois University with the goal of becoming a journalist and addressing social change.
As an act of protest against the Vietnam War, she and her husband moved to Canada. She earned a bachelor of social work in native human services at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, and a master of social work at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.
Brown Trickey taught social work at Carleton as well as various community colleges in Canada.
From 1999-2001, she served in the Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity at the U.S. Department of the Interior, where she worked to improve understanding of and commitment to diversity within the various bureaus of the department.
For nearly 50 years, Brown Trickey has fought for the rights of minority groups and the dispossessed. She meets with students, teachers and civil rights groups at schools across the country and talks about non-violence, social change, family, community and the ways in which we are all connected.
She is known as an expert diversity consultant and has studied nationally and internationally in feminist research, anti-racism, and cross-cultural and organizational change.
Once again, Brown Trickey lives in Little Rock, where she supports and participates in the educational programming of the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
For more information, call 935-4620 or visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu.