Minnijean Brown-Trickey (born September 11, 1941) was one of a group of African-American teenagers known as the “Little Rock Nine.” Brown, along with eight others (Thelma Mothershed, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas, Melba Pattillo, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Daisy Bates, and Ernest Green) faced down an angry mob and helped to desegregate Central High on September 25, 1957, under the gaze of 1,200 armed soldiers. Brown-Trickey was later suspended in 1957 due to an incident in which her bowl of chili was spilled on a white student in the cafeteria; she was expelled in February 1958 after verbally abusing a white female student, even though the girl had provoked her beforehand. After living in Canada for much of her adult life, Brown-Trickey has returned to Little Rock to continue to pioneer civil rights.

During the Sojourn trips, Minnijean conducts a class in Little Rock, Arkansas, on tolerance, bigotry, hate groups, and the ongoing struggle for social justice. Her firsthand experience with blatant racial hatred is uniquely poignant, and as a lifelong activist, Brown-Trickey is able to articulate the encounter with clarity and perspective. Her testimony not only exposes students on a Sojourn to the effects of injustices of the past, but also serves as a noteworthy example of how they can act to prevent future intolerance and discrimination. Students discuss how to develop personal action plans to face intolerance in themselves, their families, their schools and neighborhoods.

Fannie Lou Hamer  was an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant champion of civil rights. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Fannie Lou Hamer on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
In 1962, even though many were warned to appeal if they were assembled to vote by an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an associate of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hamer was the first to volunteer. Black people who registered to vote in the South faced serious hardships at that time due to institutionalized racism, including harassment, the loss of their jobs, physical beatings, and lynchings. Hamer later said, “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”

This is just one example of her bravery. In  1963, Hamer was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina with other activists from a literacy workshop. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false charge and jailed by white policemen. Once in jail, Hamer and her colleagues were beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death. Released on June 12, she needed more than a month to recover. Though the incident had profound physical and psychological effects, Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the “Freedom Ballot Campaign”, a mock election, in 1963, and the “Freedom Summer” initiative in 1964.
She was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer – most of whom were young, white, and from northern states – as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights effort should be multi-racial in nature.

Hamer continued to work in Mississippi for the Freedom Democrats and for local civil rights causes. She ran for Congress in 1964 and 1965, and was then seated as a member of Mississippi’s legitimate delegation to the Democratic National Convention of 1968, where she was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. She continued to work on other projects, including grassroots-level Head Start programs, the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign.

Hamer died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59 at a hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi and is buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. Her tombstone reads, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired”.

The Medgar Evers Memorial: University, MS

Medgar Evers, a Mississippi native, is memorialized at the Lamar Law Center of the University of Mississippi. Evers was instumental to the desegregation of the Mississippi education system. In addition to fighting for his own admission to the school of law, Evers was a key figure in the eventual admission of the first black student, James Meredith, into Ole Miss. Shortly after he made his investigations of the murder of Emmett Till and the Clyde Kennard conviction public, this NAACP lawyer was assassinated in front of his home. He has since been commemorated musically and the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi.

Evers is also remembered for his pride in Mississippi. He said, “I love the land of my birth. I do not mean just America as a country, but Mississippi, the state in which I was born. The things that I say…will be said to you in hopes of the future when … we will not have to hang our heads in shame or hold our breath when the name Mississippi is mentioned, fearing the worst. But instead, we will be anticipating the best.”

Sojourners visit the Medgar Evers memorial during the trips to learn about and to honor a man who was determined to fight for equality, both in his local community and for future generations of Americans.