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 at the Assembly Series on April 11 in Graham Chapel.
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 illegal, Little Rock’s Central High School remained segregated. Orval Farbus, the Arkansas Governor, 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 attempted to attend classes, but it wasn’t until President Eisenhower called on U.S. Army troops to escort the students into school that the students’ goals were met.
Minnijean Brown Trickey was one of those students and entered Central High as a junior. Brown would suffer from vicious harassment and humiliating non-stop attacks by 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 City.
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 Viet Nam war, Trickey and her husband moved to Canada. She completed her bachelor of social work in native human services at Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario and a master’s of social work at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.
Trickey taught social work at Carleton University 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 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 United States 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 trained nationally and internationally in anti-racism, feminist research 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 Central High School National Historic Site, which is a unit of the national park system.
The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be held at 11 a.m., Wednesday, April 11 in Graham Chapel, located north of Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd., on the Washington University Danforth campus.
For more information, call (314) 935-4620 or visit the Assembly Series Web page (http://assemblyseries.wustl.edu).