Minnijean Brown-Trickey

Minnijean Brown-Trickey (born September 11, 1941) was one of a group of African-American teenagers known as the “Little Rock Nine.” On September 25, 1957, under the gaze of 1,200 armed soldiers and a worldwide audience, Minnijean Brown-Trickey faced down an angry mob and helped to desegregate Central High. She was later expelled from Little Rock Central High School in 1958 for several reasons, among them an incident in which she dropped her tray which had chili on it and the chili splattered on the white students in the cafeteria where they had been verbally abusing her. The chili incident was a clear expression of the meeting to stop integration and get one of the Little Rock Nine expelled.

This seminal event in to American history was just the beginning of Brown-Trickey's long career as a crusader for civil rights. She has spent her life fighting for the rights of minority groups and the dispossessed. For her work, she has received the Congressional Gold Medal, the Wolf Award, the Spingarn Medal, and many other citations and awards. Under the Clinton administration, she served for a time as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior responsible for diversity. Currently, she lives in Maryland, and is continuing her work for civil rights and social equality. She is also working on her autobiography, tentatively entitled Mixed Blessing: Living Black in North America.

She lived in Canada for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, getting involved in First Nations activism and studying social work at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. A documentary film about Brown-Trickey entitled Journey to Little Rock: The Untold Story of Minnijean Brown Trickey (2002) was produced by North-East Pictures in Ottawa, where Brown-Trickey lived during the 1990s. In 2007, Laurentian also honoured Trickey with an honorary doctorate of laws.

Brown-Trickey has moved back to Little Rock, and resides there with her mother and sister. Her daughter Spirit Trickey also resides in Little Rock, and is employed at Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, where she interprets her mother's, and the other eight students' struggle to enter Central. Since Brown was one of the Little Rock Nine, she used to be a clear benefactor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and persisted in her fight for justice. Now, Brown educates many children, visiting schools and other public places.