A view of a different age

A view of a different age

EDITOR:

I commend The Vindicator for its excellent coverage of the recent visit to Youngstown by Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the nine black students who bravely defied racial barriers and desegregated all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 51 years ago.

I would also like to commend Dr. Wendy Webb, superintendent of Youngstown City Schools; Penny Wells, coordinator of the Sojourn to the Past Program; and all of the people who worked with her in the city schools and the Early College program at Youngstown State University to make Brown Tricke’s visit a success.

Brown Trickey’s visit included her speaking about her experiences at a breakfast at Trinity United Methodist Church, a program in the DeYor Center for the Performing Arts and interactions with students at several schools. It was a follow-up to city school students in the Sojourn to the Past program participating in a 10-day journey though the civil rights sites in the South during the past several years.

I was delighted to hear Brown Trickey answer so many of the questions that people had about the complex issues that sparked the desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School and President Dwight David Eisenhower’s dispatching federal troops there more than 50 years ago. That crisis, which I lived through with Brown Trickey, was complex and has multiple layers unknown to many Americans, because historians have not deal with it adequately. Brown Trickey explained the complex crisis and the importance of how it was handled by the federal government quite well.

Brown Trickey and I attended the same black elementary, junior high, and high schools in Little Rock. When she left the all-black Horace Mann School (where she was a classmate of one of my sisters) as one of the Little Rock Nine, to desegregate Little Rock Central, I was a ninth grader at the all-black Paul Laurence Dunbar Junior High. During her visit here we reminisced about the times that her father brought her to school in a pickup truck and the times that my sister and I rode a yellow school bus from a rural suburb past several white schools to attend our black schools. We also laughed about whether her deceased father, a contractor then, and my deceased mother, a single parent and maid then, would have been identified as “black working class” in the 2008 presidential election. Our memories were vivid and so were our emotions.

LEON STENNIS

Youngstown

Looking to the future

EDITOR:

A pessimist’s view: The first action of the new Congress will be to change the name of our Republic from USA to USSA (United Socialistic States of America) and we won’t like the result!

When I retired 14 years ago, we were upper middle class, economically speaking, but inflation has reduced us to lower middle class. The actions of our future government will reduce us further, probably to marginal poverty.

I resent further erosion of our situation to the benefit of those who make no contribution to our society, culturally or economically.

All you voters who contributed to this should be ashamed.

GEORGE E. SUTTON, Ph.D.

Poland