The students who crossed the colour bar
As one of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown-Trickey ran the gauntlet of racist mobs to attend her newly desegregated school.
But once inside, says Kehinde Andrews, even the US army could not protect her from the hatred of fellow pupils
When Minnijean BrownTrickey looks back at old pictures of 4 September 1957, she remembers the day her courage kicked in. “I look at the photos of the nine of us, standing there, in contrast to those crazy people,” she says. “And what I say is that they threw away their dignity and it landed on us.”
Brown-Trickey, now 79, was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American children to go to the city’s Central High School in September 1957 – and in doing so, to desegregate it. On the teenagers’ first day at the Arkansas school, white residents were so furious they formed a 1,000-strong mob at the gates. In preparation, eight of the teenagers had been instructed by Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), to meet at her house, so they could travel to the school in a group. But one of the nine, Elizabeth Eckford, had no telephone and so was not told of the safety plan. Instead she was forced to run the gauntlet of the mob’s hatred alone. The pictures of the young girl encountering the baying crowd is the enduring image of that day for many. But to Brown-Trickey, despite its power, it cannot completely capture all nine children’s fear. “Still photos cannot show how we are shaking in our boots, sandwiched between the Arkansas National Guard and a mob of crazy white people,” she says.
As they tried to walk into school, the children were verbally abused, spat on and denied admission. Three black journalists were also attacked. One, L. Alex Wilson, was hit on the head with a brick, developed a nervous condition and died three years later aged only 51. It took a further three weeks for the students actually to step inside the building, thanks to fierce resistance from Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who used the mob as a pretext for barring the nine, putting the state’s National Guard in their way. BrownTrickey recalls how he warned of “blood in the streets”, should the children be allowed to go to school.
Eventually the deadlock was broken by President Eisenhower, who sent in 1,200 troops from the army’s 101st Airborne division to take control. They dispersed the crowd and quelled the general unrest in Little Rock that had left black citizens afraid to go out after dark. The army unit then met the students at Bates’s house every day to escort them into the building, and throughout the day each of the nine would have an armed guard between classes. It is estimated that this cost $3.4m in 1957, three times what it had cost to build the actual school. At the time, BrownTrickey found it bewildering. Yet it was only the latest front in the battle over school integration. A landmark Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, had legally mandated desegregation in US schools in 1954, after the NAACP had brought a class action lawsuit with the family of Linda Brown, a student in Topeka, Kansas, who was prevented from enrolling in an all-white school. Smaller schools in rural districts in Arkansas integrated, but the pace of change was slow, and Southern states dragged their feet, going to extraordinary lengths in their resistance.
The Jim Crow laws in the South enforced strict racial apartheid, with segregated schools a key feature. Because white schools had resources poured into them, integration became a rallying cry in the civil rights struggle. But many white parents were passionately keen not to “pollute” the education of their children with African Americans, whom they saw as inferior. The year after Brown-Trickey started at Central High, a referendum was held in which 72% of the Little Rock voting public chose to close all public high schools rather than continue with integration, a crisis that took a year – and a series of legal victories by the NAACP – to resolve.
When Brown-Trickey first saw Central High, it was known as the “most beautiful high school in America”, set on a large campus and home to almost 2,000 students. Unlike schools for African Americans, it was well equipped with labs, a gym and a stadium. Yet Brown-Trickey did not think black schools were inferior. “Our black teachers were more educated than the white teachers,” she says. She wanted to go there because it was closer to her home than the all-black Horace Mann. In fact, when she put her name down for Central High, she had no idea of the storm she was entering. “The bravery doesn’t come at the beginning,” she notes.
“Arkansas governor Orval Faubus warned of ‘blood in the streets’, should the
children be allowed into Central High”
As a 16-year-old, she was well aware that African Americans lived “parallel lives to white people”, and that the circumstances were devastatingly unequal. Segregation in the South was so total, it was like living in a “bubble”, she says. She recalls going into shoe stores and seeing the “plush seats at the front” for white customers, while she was consigned to the “wooden benches at the back”. Her sister was often cross that their mother made their clothes, calling it “cheap”. But looking back, Brown-Trickey sees it as a form of everyday resistance, protecting them from the hurt of not being allowed into the changing rooms of “white” shops.
The nine pupils largely suffered in silence. So focused were they on protecting others, they did not even disclose the full extent of their individual experiences to each other. Only at an NAACP commemoration, 30 years later, did Brown-Trickey learn the torture her fellow students endured. Unsurprisingly, she never graduated from Central; only three of the nine completed their allotted time. She was expelled, and when asked the reason, says simply that it was for “being tall, beautiful and proud”.
One day in the cafeteria boys were kicking and pushing chairs into her legs as she walked by with her tray. In retaliation, she dropped her chilli on the head of one of them. When the teacher asked if she meant to spill it, she replied in a small act of rebellion that it was “accidentally on purpose”. She was suspended, and when she returned a “gaggle of girls” followed her for a week, hurling insults and stepping on her heels, until finally one of them hit her on the back of the head with a purse filled with six combination locks. She spun around, knocked the bag from the girl and shouted: “Leave me alone, white trash!” The teacher and her National Guard escort said they only witnessed the end of the incident, and she was expelled in February 1958.
After her expulsion, Brown-Trickey went to live in New York with the renowned African American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Kenneth had assessed the nine pupils’ mental health during the school year to make sure they were coping. Arriving in New York, Brown-Trickey was greeted by a huge crowd and wondered which celebrity everyone was waiting for. But the Little Rock Nine had become a source of international inspiration, receiving letters from around the world. The Clarks arranged for her to study at a prestigious private school and her
Oprah
eyes light up as she remembers being part of the “New York intelligentsia, and never knowing which author would come to dinner”. Later, as a student activist, Brown-Trickey met her future husband, Roy Trickey. The pair were conscientious objectors, and when he was called up to fight in Vietnam in 1967, they left for Canada. They settled and had six children, while Brown-Trickey worked as an anti-racist educator and green campaigner.
For years, she could not bring herself to tell her children what she had gone through as a teenager. Without the images to back up her story, she didn’t believe they would be able to comprehend. When her eldest daughter was 15, she finally gave her the 1981 TV movie about events at the school, to watch. The resulting conversations, according to one of her younger daughters, Spirit Tawfiq, were difficult: “Sometimes my mother would be excited, and sometimes she would burst into tears.” Spirit went on to work at the visitor centre in Little Rock and wrote a play based on conversations with her grandmother, Imogene Brown, about the impact of the ordeal on the family.
Crisis at Central High,
One Ninth,
Surprisingly, Brown-Trickey also kept her past a secret from her friends and colleagues. In fact, it was only when she appeared on
in 1992 that she revealed her identity to her shocked social circle. The show had tracked her down using Canadian phonebooks, and she thought it time to share her experiences. Later, she returned to the US to work for the Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity. Today, she works extensively with young people, jokingly telling me “old people are a waste of time”.
The chaos of the recent US presidential election was “triggering” for her in many ways. Watching mobs of Trump supporters “losing their heads” was like “watching a kind of madness”. Meanwhile, the police killing of George Floyd earlier this year “felt like the 1960s, even worse because it was 50 years later [and] it’s still not a better time”. Perhaps this sense of sadness should be no surprise. The response to the desegregation of education was white flight from the public school system, especially in the inner cities, which means that US public schools are more segregated today than they were in the late 1960s. And African American girls remain far more likely to be suspended. “The US has two values: violence and segregation, and they do them both really well,” Brown-Trickey laments.
Making matters worse is what she calls a “profound intentional ignorance” induced by the “training” that Americans receive in schools. In Central High she challenged her history teacher, who was telling the class that black people were more than happy on plantations. As much as we would like things to have changed, she highlights Trump as the “definitive example of an American education”. His administration went further than just defending the Eurocentric curriculum in schools, she says. It also banned federal money being spent on “anti-American” diversity training.
Yet she is far from drowning in despair. She is proud of the way young people are taking up the fight through Black Lives Matter. And she reminds them that it was only due to her and eight fellow students’ refusal to back down that Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne and broke the barricade around Central High School. People may feel powerless, she says, but with organisation, strength and commitment, “you can make presidents act”.
“US schools are more segregated today than in the 1960s. And African American girls
remain far more likely to be suspended”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited.