PROFILE: Spirit Trickey
Clinton School of Public Service Student

Spirit Trickey was an eighth grader growing up in Ontario, Canada, when she first learned about her mother’s story. Until then, Minnijean Brown Trickey hadn’t told her daughter the tale of her historic childhood in Little Rock, Ark., where she and eight other black students braved an angry mob to integrate all-white Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957.

The story of the Little Rock Nine, as they became known, has shaped Spirit’s life ever since she learned about her mother’s courageous acts. It’s been a life framed by racial and cultural reconciliation.

As the daughter of mixed-raced parents — her father is white — Spirit believes her purpose is singular: “to be a bridge.” She adds, “I want to be a bridge between two generations, a bridge between black and white, and a bridge between the U.S. and Canada.”

Now 29 years old, Spirit lives in Little Rock where she works as a part-time guide at the Central High National Historic Site museum, which is dedicated to telling the story of the Central High crisis. At the museum, she leads tours and greets visitors only a short distance from the school where her mother experienced the hatred of racial discrimination a generation earlier.

Inspired by her mother’s legacy of action, Spirit is also a graduate student at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, where she is preparing for a career in “the arts and social change.”

Recently, Spirit produced her first play, “One Ninth,” which chronicles the Central High crisis from her mother’s perspective. It’s a story that Spirit says she spent years learning.

While historians and other members of the Little Rock Nine have written books about the crisis, Minnijean had not published her own experiences. So when Spirit had to write a script for her college playwriting class in 2002, she saw an opportunity to tell the story in a new way.

“I was always getting everyone else’s perspective,” Spirit says. “I wanted to represent my mother’s voice for once.”

The major facts of the Central High crisis are well known and are chronicled in history books, but the personal details and internal turmoil that Minnijean and her family faced are brought to the stage in a way that only a daughter could in “One Ninth.”

While Spirit knew about the history of the crisis from working at the museum, she began having detailed conversations with her mother, grandmother and aunt to gain her family’s perspective on the events of 1957. “It was the perfect script,” Spirit says. “It had everything — all the dramatic elements I needed.”

She learned about the polka-dot dress her mother wore and the innocence she lost on September 4 when the Little Rock Nine were turned away from their first day of school, not only by the mob, but also by the Arkansas National Guard under order of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus.

She learned about her grandmother’s hidden anxieties on September 24, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas Guard and sent in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to protect the students, so that they could finally attend their first day at Central High.

She also learned about the struggles her mother went through on a daily basis as she was either taunted or ignored by her white classmates and Central High administrators.

Most importantly, Spirit’s script provided her family a chance to take an introspective view of what they went through in 1957.

“It was a healing process,” Spirit says. “It was a great gift to my mother and grandmother.”

And for Spirit, learning and writing her mother’s story has inspired her to strive for more in her own life.

She recalls the fall of 1997, when she and her mother traveled to Little Rock from Canada to participate in the 40th anniversary commemoration of the Central High crisis. President Bill Clinton attended the event and awarded each member of the Little Rock Nine the Congressional Gold Medal on the same site that 40 years before saw them cursed and spit on.

At the commemoration, Spirit, then a high school senior, says that she began to fully grasp the magnitude of her mother’s place in history.

“My mother was changing the world at my age,” she recalls thinking at the time. “And I’m flunking math.”

It’s that realization that led Spirit toward a career in public service. Before deciding to attend the Clinton School, “it never occurred to me that public service could be a profession,” she says.

Her work at the school has solidified her desire to pursue her dream of a career in the arts and social change. But it has also opened her mind to the numerous ways in which she can pursue that dream.

Whatever she decides to do, one thing is clear.

“I feel that it’s my duty to carry on what the Little Rock Nine started,” she says.