Minnijean Brown of the “Little Rock Nine”

by Mark Sameth

Minnijean Brown — one of the historic “Little Rock Nine” — lived in Hastings in 1958 and 1959. Minnijean came to Hastings when she was 16, after having been harassed, threatened, and ultimately expelled (for “verbal retaliation”) from the Arkansas high school she helped integrate in 1957. She spent the rest of her high school career living on Pinecrest Drive at the home of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, with their children Hilton and Kate, attending New Lincoln High School in Harlem from which she was graduated on June 5, 1959.

Background to Little Rock  

In 1954, the Supreme Court decided, in their Brown v. Board of Education decision, that public schools had to be integrated, overruling the “separate but equal” doctrine which had been the law of the land since the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896.

But two years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional, school boards were still “slow-walking” integration. A lawsuit was brought by the Little Rock chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in February of 1956. That August, the judge handed down his decision: desegregation in Little Rock would have to begin in the fall of 1957.

Of two hundred eligible Black students, only 20 were accepted for enrollment — a number subsequently lowered by the School Board. Moreover, Superintendent Virgil Blossom informed the students that they would not be allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities: no sports, no band, no social or service organizations, no holding of student government offices, no attendance at school dances.

Over the summer of 1957, Daisy Bates, president of Little Rock’s local NAACP chapter, coached the students, trying to get them ready psychologically for what they would face when school opened.

Crisis in Little Rock  

 On September 2, 1957 — Labor Day, and the day before school was set to open — Governor Orval Faubus announced that he had called out the Arkansas National Guard, ordering them to prevent any Blacks from entering Central High.

Three weeks later, on September 24, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard. On September 25, the Little Rock Nine (after one failed attempt on September 4 and an aborted attempt on September 23) were escorted — under the protection of the 101rst Airborne Division — into the building. As Minnijean Brown-Trickey later said, “He had to do it, because we kept going back.”

Three months later, Little Rock NAACP’s Daisy Bates wrote the NAACP national executive secretary Roy Wilkins “Conditions are yet pretty rough in the school for the children… the treatment of the children had been getting steadily worse for the last two weeks in the form of kicking, spitting, and general abuse.”

As Brown-Trickey would later explain, it was “20 nice kids, 100 bad kids, and 1,900 kids who stood by and said nothing.” The Little Rock Nine were body-slammed into lockers. When they took showers after gym, the cold water would be cut off. According to Smithsonian Magazine (“A Member of the Little Rock Nine Discusses Her Struggle to Attend Central High,” 2016), Minnijean’s fantasy of what life might be like at Central had evaporated.

As one of the first nine African-American students to attend Little Rock Central High School in 1957, she was taunted, ridiculed and physically battered. On her first day, she faced the horror of the Arkansas National Guard blocking her entrance to the building and the terror of an angry, white mob encircling the school.

Although troops remained at Central High School throughout the school year, the Little Rock Nine were subjected to verbal and physical assaults on a daily basis. The African-American students were isolated and never placed in classes with each other, so they couldn’t corroborate their torment. On three separate occasions, Minnijean had cafeteria food spilled on her, but none of her white abusers ever seemed to get punished.

In December 1957, she dropped her chili-laden lunch tray on the heads of two boys in the cafeteria who were taunting and knocking into her. She was suspended for six days. That school notice is now part of the Smithsonian collection along with a heartfelt note by her parents documenting all the abuse that their daughter had endured leading up to the incident. Then in February 1958, Minnijean verbally responded to some jeering girls who had hit her in the head with a purse. That retaliation caused her to be expelled from Central High.

“I had a sense of failure that lasted for decades over that,” says Brown-Trickey. After she left Central, white students held printed signs that said, “One down…eight to go.”

Minnijean Brown in Hastings

Upon her expulsion from Central, Minnijean was invited by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark — the social psychologists whose “doll tests” had been instrumental in the Brown v. Board of Education case — to live with them in Hastings where she had been offered a scholarship to attend New York City’s progressive New Lincoln School.

She never forgot her arrival here. In an interview conducted at the former Clark home in Hastings in 2015 by her daughter Spirit Tawfiq, Brown-Trickey remembered that it had been her first time on an airplane. When she deplaned, she said, there were so many photographers, movie cameras, and flashbulbs going off that she looked around and assumed that a movie star must have been travelling on the same plane. She recalled the drive to Hastings, the car going up the hill which is Pinecrest Drive, and meeting “Dr. Mamie” and the Clarks’ children Kate and Hilton for the first time. Her mother, who was travelling with her, stayed “long enough to get to know where I was going to be, get to know the Clarks, get the feeling that I was going to be safe, and also to sort of have that experience of not having me there, because we were really close.” 

She recalled her time at New Lincoln High School as a time of “immense” learning.” The world opening up for me was a world that, as a voracious reader, I’d always fantasized about, and here it was laid out in front of me.” She was fascinated by Harlem. Befriended by Jewish classmates, she attended Passover seders for the first time, and met Jewish friends’ grandmothers, with concentration camp tattoos on their arms.  

Minnijean and the Little Rock Nine were reunited in June of 1958, invited to receive the “Better Race Relations Award” of the New York Hotel Trades Council — which had been awarded just the year before to Dr. Martin Luther King. The award was presented at a ceremony in the union’s Gertrude Lane Auditorium in New York City on June 12, 1958.

Over the next few days, the students were welcomed to City Hall by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, and to the United Nations by Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and Under Secretary General (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Ralph Bunche. At the Manhattan Hotel, they met in a specially set-aside room with New York State Governor Averill Harriman. The union also arranged a sight-seeing tour: the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, Lindy’s delicatessen, and attendance at the Broadway show “Jamaica,” where they visited backstage with Lena Horne and Ricardo Montalbán. A photomontage of the trip is here.

“And we got to know them,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled. “And I remember we had a party for them, and Minnijean was with us. And we had fun. That was enjoyable! … They were up here for some event, and we agreed to invite them all up to the house. And they reminisced.”

Twelfth Grade and Graduation

In the fall of 1958, Minnijean entered the 12th grade. She continued travelling into the city from Hastings every day by car with the Clarks. “My wife’s Northside Center for Child Development was in the same building as the New Lincoln School on 110^th Street. We’d just take her in,” Dr. Kenneth Clark recalled. “She drove in with us.” And at the end of each school day, Minnijean took the train back to Hastings.

“She was full of courage,” recalled Dr. Clark. But, as the Clark’s had agreed to her living with them, she was their responsibility.  

Mamie and I were coming home from something in the city. And we were driving down Broadway, near Andrus, where Andrus split, Broadway going north and Broadway going south, and we were going north in order to make the turn. And it was an icy road, and we skidded in our car, and came out of it all right. And when we got home, we both said: We didn’t know what was going to happen. But we both felt: We’d left Minnijean at home alone. That was in our minds.   

On June 5, 1959, Minnijean Brown graduated from New Lincoln High School. Dr. Mamie Clark had a dressmaker make a dress for the occasion — which Minnijean herself had designed (the dress is today in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution). The graduation celebration included champagne donated by a New Lincoln High School family — the Manischewitzes.

After high school, Minnijean Brown majored in journalism at Southern Illinois University. She married, had six children, and studied social work at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, completing her Master’s degree in Social Work (MSW) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In the 1990s, she returned to the United States.  

Legacies and Honors

In 2021, Minnijean Brown-Trickey continues her work as a life-long advocate for non-violent social change, anti-racism workshop facilitator, anti-bullying advocate, and frequent public speaker and mentor to children and teens. To date, thousands of children have gone through the Sojourn to the Past program, “immersing middle and high school students from diverse backgrounds in academic, transformative weeklong moving-classroom… study trips to the American Deep South and Washington, D.C.” She has been quoted as saying, “I think working with young people is the most radical thing a person can do.”

A few highlights from her public life:

1996: Minnijean Brown-Trickey appeared with the Little Rock Nine — and three of their tormentors — on Oprah in 1996, “The Little Rock Nine Forgive Their Tormentors”. One of those tormentors, David Sontag, specifically apologized to Minnijean for the incident in the cafeteria.

1998: Congress voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Little Rock Nine on October 21, 1998.

1999: President Bill Clinton presented each of the Little Rock Nine with their Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony at the White House on November 9, 1999. 

1999 – 2001: Appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior responsible for diversity in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. Brown-Trickey served in that capacity until 2001.

2005:  On August 30, 2005, statues honoring the Little Rock Nine were unveiled at a ceremony on the grounds of the State Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas. More than 2,000 people attended the event, including the guests of honor, the Little Rock Nine.

2005: Later that same day, the United States Post Office issued a “1957 Little Rock Nine” commemorative stamp.  

2012: Central High School National Historic Site awarded Minnijean Brown-Trickey “The Soul of Humanity” award on September 25, 2012.

2015: Minnijean Brown-Trickey returned to Hastings. She was interviewed by her daughter Spirit Trickey (now Spirit Tawfiq) in the former home of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, where she had lived in 1958 and 1959, for “Roots of the Spirit.”

2016: Backstage at a concert in Little Rock on the evening of April 30, 2016, Paul McCartney met with two of the Little Rock Nine, Thelma Mothershed Wair and Elizabeth Eckford. At the concert, McCartney explained that his 1968 Beatles song “Blackbird” had been inspired by the Little Rock Nine. The next day he tweeted: 

Minnijean Brown-Trickey lived in Hastings-on-Hudson for only two years, but to her they were profoundly important years. On leaving Little Rock, coming to live with the Clarks in Hastings, and attending New Lincoln High School she said: “It changed my life.”

A footnoted version of this article is in the Historical Society’s files.

Society members can refer to the Fall 2015 issue of the Hastings Historian, which has an article about Ms. Brown-Trickey entitled, “A Civil Rights Pioneer Returns to Hastings.”

Mark Sameth is a long-time resident of Hastings with an interest in all things historical. An ordained rabbi, he is the author of “The Name: A History of the Dual-Gendered Hebrew Name for God,” about which more information is available on his website https://www.rabbimarksameth.com