Minnijean Brown-Trickey of the “Little Rock Nine” to Speak At Lycoming College

WILLIAMSPORT, PA – Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the nine students to break the color barrier and desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, will be speaking at Lycoming College on Thursday, February 12.

Trickey was one of a group of  African-American teenagers know as the “Little Rock Nine”.  On September 25, 1957, in front of 1,200 armed soldiers and the entire world, Trickey and eight other students marched through a protesting mob and through the doors of Central High School. That was the first day of an arduous high school experience.

Desegregating Central High School was just the beginning of Trickey’s activism for Civil Rights; she has dedicated her life to fighting for the rights of minority groups and the dispossessed. 

Trickey has received the U.S. Congressional Medal, the Wolf Award, the Springarn Medal and numerous other citations and awards.  Under the Clinton administration, Trickey served for a time as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior responsible for diversity.

Currently, she lives in Maryland where she is continuing her work for civil rights.  She is also working on her autobiography, tentatively entitled, Mixed Blessing: Living Black in North America.

Trickey will be speaking in the Clarke Chapel at 7:30 P.M.  Her talk is part of Lycoming’s spring Symposium, “Brown vs. the Board of Education:  The Road to Civil Rights”. 

Other Events:

Feb. 18:  Clarence Dart, one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, 7:30 p.m., Barclay Lecture Hall, Heim Bld., Lycoming College

 Feb. 19: Benjamin Hooks, former executive director of NAACP, 7:30 p.m., Clarke Chapel, Lycoming College

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