Paul C. Bunn students learn about civil rights movement

By Denise Dick

denise_dick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Her fellow students threw things at her, called her names and threatened her.

It was 1957 and Minnijean Brown Trickey, then 16, was one of nine black students to integrate the all-white Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., following a court order.

“The worst part of this was a mob of people screaming hate,” Trickey, 75, told students at Paul C. Bunn Elementary School Monday.

Trickey’s appearance was part of Nonviolence Week which started Sunday and runs through Saturday. Many of the children listening to help presentation wore purple, the color of Nonviolence Week.

The observance began in the city and through the efforts of students who participated in the Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past became statewide. Through Sojourn to the Past, students visit places in the South that were significant to the civil-rights movement. They also meet people, including Trickey, who played roles in that movement.

The mob that greeted Trickey and her eight classmates shouted, “Kill them,” “You aren’t going to school with my kid” and yelled about hanging the new students from a tree.

“We were very, very scared,” Trickey said.

Soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard prevented Trickey and the eight others from entering the school. That blockade lasted three weeks with television cameras capturing the vitriol and broadcasting it around the world.

Then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus to recall the National Guard because its presence was illegal, according to a court order.

Eisenhower sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to protect the nine black students.

Trickey and the eight other students went back to the school.

“When we got there, the mob was bigger,” she said.

Bunn students studied Trickey’s story in preparation for her visit. They peppered her with questions, some written on index cards: How did the mob of screaming people make you feel? What did your parents think? Were you scared?

Trickey answered each question and encouraged the students to request a book, “Warriors Don’t Cry,” be added to the school’s library. The author, Melba Pattillo Beals, also one of the Little Rock Nine, tells their story.

Trickey also urged the Bunn students to see the Disney film, “The Ernest Green Story.” Green also was one of the Little Rock Nine.

Trickey has been a speaker for Nonviolence Week in the city, but Monday marked her first visit to Bunn. Martha King, the school’s guidance counselor, asked Penny Wells, director of Sojourn to the Past, to schedule the elementary school visit.

King said that throughout this week, Bunn students are reciting the principles of Nonviolence Week.

Last school year, King started a peer-mediation program that encourages students to seek help from classmates to resolve conflicts.