Little Rock Nine icon to appear at NPC’s guest speaker series
National Park College will welcome one of the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown Trickey, as part of the “We Belong” Guest Speaker Series to celebrate September’s International Day of Peace.
The event will begin at noon on Sept. 13 in the Eisele Auditorium of the Frederick M. Dierks Center for Nursing and Health Sciences.
Brown Trickey was one of nine African-American students who, in 1957, resisted opposition to desegregation to enter Little Rock Central High School with protection from federal troops, according to her biography.
Her biography states she served in the Clinton Administration as deputy assistant secretary for Workforce Diversity at the Department of Interior. She was the Shipley Visiting Writer for Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University. For the past 10 years, she has been a nonviolence and anti-racism facilitator for Sojourn to the Past, a 10-day interactive history experience for high school students. She continues as a teacher, writer and motivational speaker. She is the mother of three sons and three daughters.
Spirit Tawfiq, Brown Trickey’s daughter, will also be on hand for the event. Tawfiq is the playwright of “One Ninth,” which is “an exploration of human dignity and racial conflict as seen through the eyes of Minnijean Brown Trickey.” She served as chief of interpretation for the Central High School National Historic Site for 10 years and currently is a speaking agent for Brown Trickey and Ruby Bridges. She also works at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York.
“We had a successful year with our ‘We Belong’ Guest Speaker Series, and we wanted to build on that success,” said Melissa Krafft, president of NPC’s diversity club. “As we brainstormed possible speakers and a timeline, it all just fit to invite Ms. Brown Trickey to campus in September which is the month we celebrate the International Day of Peace.”
Krafft said NPC tries to be a welcoming and inclusive campus, making this a great opportunity to have Brown Trickey speak.
“Minnijean Brown Trickey has traveled the globe to spread a message of peace and reconciliation and we wanted to celebrate that message here at National Park College,” she said.
According to Darla Thurber, NPC’s chief diversity officer, after reading The Sentinel-Record’s coverage of a previous “We Belong” event, Malvern Middle School teacher Claudine James reached out about future series speakers.
“She’s also on the board of the Arkansas Humanities Council and she just had a genuine want for us to succeed and continue on. She gave us some suggestions for speakers and one of those she sent through email was the website for the Little Rock Nine,” Thurber said.
Thurber also said she visited Central High School about 18 years ago while Tawfiq was there and was inspired by her mother’s accounts she gave.
Prior to the event, sponsored by the Women’s Leadership Council, a luncheon will be held for invited guests, sponsors, key supporters and the foundation board, Thurber said.
“The free event to the public and our students will begin at approximately noon in more of comfortable, talk-show style set up,” she said. “We’ll have Minnijean and Spirit down on the floor together with us. We’ll have some questions that we will ask and then we’ll open it up to Q&A from the audience.”
To address the capacity issue, she said the atrium of the Dierks Center will have a livestream set up to accommodate. In addition, livestreaming will be available throughout campus in classrooms with the capability to watch. Thurber said NPC has also reached out to the area high schools about tuning in to the livestream.
The vision for this year’s series is to have more community involvement, building on the momentum of the 201718 series.
“We’ve had a lot of people from the community attend this previous year so I think we’ve really established ourselves,” Thurber said. “At this level, there are a lot of community folks that want to be a part of it, they want to sponsor it in some way, they want to partner. We’ve just raised the bar. We had wonderful speakers last year that really just set it up so I think that’s given us some momentum with the community to bring in a large variety of speakers.”