Editor's note: Lynn Wheeler, president of Wheeler Communication Group, LLC, and former Charlotte mayor pro tem, is on a weeklong civil rights tour led by Julian Bond.

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Day 3: Little Rock, Ark.

First thing Monday morning we boarded a bus and headed to Central High School.

Why?

Because Little Rock’s Central High was central in the advancement of school desegregation throughout the South.

A crisis ensued when nine African American students tried to desegregate the school on Sept. 4, 1957. They were barred from entering by Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus. It wasn’t until President Eisenhower called in Army troops that the black students were allowed to enter.

Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the original nine, recalled what that first day was like.

She said she was excited about her first day at Central. She said she and the other eight had been selected because of their excellent grades and exemplary behavior.

She rose early that morning and put on her best dress, thinking to herself: “I am so cute. I am so pretty. Everyone is going to like me.”

But everyone didn’t love her.

When she and the others arrived at the school, they were greeted by a mob of angry white student who taunted, yelled and spat on them.

“Our hearts were broken,” Brown-Trickey recalled. “We believed we were just going to school and we couldn’t imagine anyone would hate us. That was the shock. They didn’t even know us.”

Brown-Trickey said she tried to bear the indignities silently, but after five girls followed her for days saying repeatedly how ugly she was and stepping on her heels until they bled, she called them “white trash” in frustration.

For that, she was expelled.

I found Brown-Trickey to be feisty and humorous, but intertwined in her bravado was an essence of bitterness. Can you blame her? An aura of confusion still seems to envelop her after all these years.

“What did I do to make them do that?” she asked rhetorically at one point.

Brown-Trickey shared that she has embarked on a lifelong study of what happened.
Listening to her story, I found myself mesmerized. She is an amazing woman who, at the age of 15, walked peacefully against an angry mob just so she could go to school.

After her talk we toured Central High. Our guide challenged us as we walked up the steps to imagine and angry mob and thousands of troops surrounding us.

We left the school and headed for the Clinton Library. The archival and museum holds approximately 76.8 million pages of documents and more than 84,000 artifacts. It even has an exact replica of the Clinton oval office.

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Tomorrow we travel three and a half hours to Clarksdale, Miss., to learn about the birth of blues and its heavy African American influence.

Read days 1 and 2 of Wheeler's blog.
 

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