American History Lives (And It Has A Few Choice Words For You, Mister Reverend Jesse Jackson)

Warning: This post may accidentally stray into serious territory.

Mostly what I do here is make light of stuff, because honestly? There’s enough somber serious stuff going on in the world already. Plus, it’s easier than tackling heavy subjects — particularly when our Commander-in-Chief, who seems to be doing his best to make Nixon, Ford and Carter look like the Dream Team, emits a constant stream of blunders at which we absolutely must laugh in order to keep from descending into despair at the level to which the office of the president has sunk. (Side Note: We are talking here about the man who this week blamed Saddam Hussein, who is dead, for the death of Nelson Mandela, who is not. I’m reasonably sure he was trying to be all symbolic, but really? someone who works for him should tell him to never, ever try to be symbolic. Or profound. Something just gets lost in translation.) Occasionally, however, even I have to talk about stuff that matters in a way that doesn’t just serve it up on a snarky little skewer (or one of those toothpicks with the cellophane on the end — I love those. They make everything taste better).

“We were too dumb to know it was going to be history-making.”

So. If you couldn’t find your favorite bleeding heart liberal on Thursday night, s/he was probably where I was, at the Wendy Williamson Auditorium on campus, listening to Minnijean Brown-Trickey talk about social equality. Brown-Trickey was one of the Little Rock Nine, the African-American students who were the first to enroll at the then-all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957. If you don’t know her by name, you would almost certainly recognize footage of her being heckled by an angry mob for the unforgivable crime of trying to enjoy her Constitutionally-guaranteed rights and, y’know, get an education. And stuff.

“I know you really don’t know what happened,” Brown-Trickey told the crowd gathered for the free lecture. “I still haven’t figured it out.”

It’s easy to forget that Major Historical Figures (and even Minor Historical Figures) generally aren’t born into the role — that they start out ordinary people and end up ordinary people, and in the middle something really major happens that changes their lives and maybe other people’s lives, and usually none of it’s planned. That’s why journalists are always writing about how “refreshing” it is to meet “down-to-earth” famous people who “seem just like everyone else.” We expect these larger-than-life types to be just that, and yet we recognize on some level that they’re really just normal people like us, and we may build up unrealistic fantasies about them but we’d really rather they’d act just like the rest of us. It’s notable that, even after fifty years, Brown-Trickey seemed both at ease and at odds with her role as a Hero Of American History, speaking about the experience in the third person — because, as she says, she’s not that girl who turned 16 in September 1957 —casually referring to Thurgood Marshall as “a lawyer” — who, she added as an aside, later ended up on the Supreme Court. She made a point of saying the Little Rock Nine were “named so by the media,” not by themselves, but she also using the name easily, the way anyone else might say “we” or “my friends.” It has to be tough walking the thin line between Living Legend and Everyday American.

Brown-Trickey didn’t actually do the one thing one might reasonably have expected to do; that is, tell the story of what it was like to be at the center of one of the ugliest and most heroic moments in American history. Instead, she kind of talked around it.

“I really didn’t walk to school ten miles through the snow, as we are wont to tell our children,” she said. She seemed genuinely surprised when she asked how many members of the audience were familiar with the forced desegregation of the Little Rock schools and nearly everyone in the house raised a hand, but she also made sure to point out that it’s something every American ought to know about — she’d asked the same question recently at a top university, she said, and when few of the students raised their hands she told them, “Oh my God — you should get your money back.” Why, she asked, isn’t the story of Little Rock Central High School part of the core curriculum for every student in the United States? Why is it reduced to a paragraph or two in some history books? Her answer to teenagers: “Nobody wants you to know that fourteen-, fifteen- and sixteen-year-old people can shift the world.” But while she spent all this time talking about the importance of talking about the Little Rock desegregation debacle, she never actually really talked about it. She never said what people wanted her to say: “When I got out of the car, I felt ____. When I walked toward the building and hundreds of people were shouting at me, I felt ____. This _____ is what it’s like to be escorted to school by National Guardsmen. This _____ is what it’s like to know that there are people in your math class who would like to see you dead.”

On the other hand, she did talk about racism and sociology and struggle in terms both broad and specific, and coming from someone who has been as deep in the trenches as it’s possible to go, her words carried weight.

“This country has an amazing history of struggle,” Brown-Trickey said, citing struggles faced by immigrants, by women, by labor groups. “We must interrogate the comprehensive whole of racist power and ideology. I really do believe that segregation is the national frame of mind … especially in the ‘Lower 48.’” (Side Note: Props to her for picking up on the local terminology. And so quickly, too.) Young people, she said, are “victims of skewed narratives.” They have been led to believe that everything is hunky-dory, when in fact, racial inequality is alive and well.

“When you have a society like ours that thinks everything is fine,” she said, “you really have a hard time even defining some of this stuff.”

“This stuff” means little things — like making sure the art hanging on classroom walls reflects real diversity — and big things, like the Jena Six, on which Brown-Trickey commented when prompted by an audience member’s question.

“The script is the same, and that’s what disturbs me,” she said. “We have a justice system that is inherently and basically racist.” Hurricane Katrina, she added, highlighted the true disregard for racial equality that is at the heart of U.S. domestic policy: “It showed that we ain’t as great as we like to say we are.”

Which was the feeling that overwhelmed me as I sat freezing in the Williamson. (Seriously, it was about four times colder inside the auditorium than it was outside, where there are mountains with snow on them.) When I was a kid reading about this stuff, I always used to think about how great it was that we didn’t have problems with racial inequality anymore. I’d never seen a drinking fountain marked “Colored” or a KKK hood, at least not in anything other than a grainy black-and-white photo, and I went to a nice elementary school where we sang lovely songs about the world being a rainbow with many different colors and celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day with special assemblies and had a big multicultural night every year. I don’t think it was until I went to college, or maybe not even until I moved to New York, a city that still has ghettoes — not the fenced-off, state-imposed ghettoes of mid-century Europe, but cultural enclaves, neighborhoods divided by race — that I realized how wrong I’d been. I grew up believing affirmative action and ANCSA had fixed everything, that racism was just something ignorant people used to make themselves feel better about being useless backwoods assholes.

“Why are we not there?” Brown-Trickey asked. I wondered, too. We have beautiful ideas in this country about equality and opportunity; some of the best words, in fact, ever written on those subjects, and they’re right there in our founding documents, and yet we still have Katrina and the Jena Six and glass ceilings and border fences and hate crimes. Why are we not there?

Watching that film of Little Rock, there in the same room with the woman who’d actually lived it, I was struck all over again by the realness of bigotry. Minnijean Brown-Trickey is still alive. So are a plenty of those people shouting at her in that footage. So are their children, and their grandchildren, whom I have to believe were raised with those same hateful “values” — because it’s not like integration fixed racism. And now we have a government that prioritizes social equality issues somewhere below, oh, dusting the Lincoln Bedroom, and a Supreme Court that actually went so far as to roll back Brown v. Board of Ed. That’s why we’re not there.

Okay, so it wasn’t all heavy-duty socio-political discourse. She had a sense of humor, too, although it didn’t really start to show until the inevitable, interminable question-and-answer session began (a moment in the lecture at which she chose to paraphrase Maurice Sendak, kicking it off by announcing, “Let the wild rumpus begin”).


In response to a question about contemporary inequality issues:

“I must have a good quote from Howard Zinn in here someplace.”


On her website:

“It doesn’t have anything worth seeing on it.”


On her post-Little Rock lifestyle:

“I was maybe a hippie or something for a while.”

“I’m a convicted tree-hugger, by the way.”


On the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s remark that Barack Obama is “acting white” in his response to the Jena Six situation:

“Did Jesse Jackson say that? I would give him a piece of my mind if I knew that … I’m’a check with Jesse about that.”


On Barack Obama’s alleged white-acting:

“Well, you know, he can act half white if he wants to, as far as I’m concerned … (but) when he steps outside, he’s black.”


On the alleged chili-dumping incident that led to her expulsion from Central:

“I wish I had dumped the bowl of chili on the dude’s head.”


She also shared her list of recommended reading (Side Note: Her answer took less time to deliver than the question, which was asked by an oversharing grad student):

Simple Justice, Richard Kluger
Shame of a Nation, Jonathan Kozol
Sundown Towns, James W. Loewen
Warriors Don’t Cry, Melba Pattillo Beals (another of the LR9)
Turn Away Thy Son, Elizabeth Jacoway

“That’s a good start, ’cause that’s about ten thousand pages right there.”

(Side Note On Q&A Sessions, Which Unfailingly Make Me Want To Curl Up And Die: [Let’s be honest. You knew I wasn’t going to make it all the way through without sniping at something.] Why does everyone think they have to tell their life story before they ask a simple question? I’d estimate that fifteen to twenty percent more questions could be asked at these kinds of events if every questioner didn’t feel the need to preface his or her interrogative with an effing biography. Yes, I mean you, grad school girl. The fact that you are getting a Master’s degree in history does not make your question any more relevant or interesting, nor does it impress anyone at all. Your insistence on talking about it, however, did awaken fontrum in all present.)

There, now, that wasn’t too heavy, now, was it? I promise tomorrow I’ll go back to writing about my thesis and my shoes and sharing funny little anecdotes about my dog.