Minnijean Brown-Trickey was racially abused just for going to school and needed a soldier to protect her.
She even had battery acid thrown at her.
That was in the late 1950s.
Now, nearly 70 years later, the American civil rights activist and one of the famous Little Rock Nine, has just visited the Bay of Plenty where she spoke to more than 800 social studies and history students from colleges across the region, accompanied by her daughter, Spirit Tawfiq.
Students attending the talk included law and kapa haka groups. They travelled from Tauranga, Whakatāne, Waihī and Taupō to meet Brown-Trickey and hear her speak at John Paul College in Rotorua on Monday.
In 1957, Brown-Trickey was one of the first nine black students to attend Central High School in the United States - a desegregated school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Although the law desegregating schools was passed in 1954, it would take three years and pressure from world leaders for the students to have soldiers protect them so they could attend school.
President Dwight D Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to ensure the students’ safety and uphold the Supreme Court’s rulings on desegregation.
Still they endured opposition from white students and parents. Racial abuse such as “the N-Word” were hurled at them and they also had battery acid dropped on them.
“We all had holes in our clothes because if you happen to get a drop, it could destroy it,’' she told the students.
Brown-Trickey’s best friend, Melba Joy Patillo Beals, also one of the nine, had acid thrown in her face and her guard quickly took her to the water fountain and flushed it out, Brown-Trickey said.
At John Paul College this week, Brown-Trickey told her story of surviving segregation - a story her children only found out about as teenagers and only after they began experiencing racism themselves growing up in Ontario, Canada.
Tawfiq told the packed hall: “I was a young person who experienced name calling and bullying and feeling like I didn’t belong.”
“Let alone my mother had to have a soldier to walk her to and from class.”
Tawfiq said her mother chose not to tell her children about being one of the Little Rock Nine because they were living in Canada and at that time “the nation had not acknowledged” what happened to the nine students.
This included Elizabeth Eckford, who “to this very day suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of that mob raging”, Tawfiq said.
Tawfiq said it was fascinating to their family that students in New Zealand studied their history.
“In your beautiful country, all the way across the world, you in some instances know more about the Little Rock Nine than some of the young people in the United States.”
Brown-Trickey, now 82, said: “My life is at the end. I feel a bit of urgency to tell this story.
“I want you to know that the Little Rock Nine were kids just like you.”
In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the nine students.
“It was at that moment that I began to understand the magnitude and scale of what happened at Central High School in 1957,” Tawfiq said.
Brown-Trickey said despite all efforts, “they really like segregation in the US and they’re good at it”.
“So that’s kind of my heartbreak.’'
During question-and-answer time, one Western Heights student askedBrown-Trickey why she was expelled from Central Rock High.
“Because I was tall, beautiful and proud,” she answered.
But it was because she’d had a run-in with a group of boys in the cafeteria while carrying a tray of chilli. They were kicking chairs and slamming them into her, so she gently elevated her wrist and opened her hand letting the chilli fall onto a boy.
She later told a teacher she’d dropped the chilli on the boy “accidentally on purpose”.
By then, she had practised as much non-reactive resistance as possible, blocking out some instances including when a group of girls tried to “shove her head down a toilet”, Tawfiq said.
Brown-Trickey: “Bullying is crazy-making.’'
“No bully has ever said it was because of their own problem or weakness.”
She told the Rotorua Daily Post: “I figured out later in life, that part of the socialisation [of segregation] is that I wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.”
At her strongest, resistance felt like the white people in the mob on her first day, “threw away their dignity and it landed on us”, Brown-Trickey said.
“I learned more of that at Central than I had known before in my life.
“That whole idea was to make sure we were convinced that we weren’t pretty and that we weren’t special and that we weren’t smart.”
“I kept saying to myself, if you people are willing to do all this to keep me out, I should be here.”
John Paul College Humanities teacher Nicky Fraser said to host Brown-Trickey in Rotorua was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.
Brown-Trickey said her experience at Central High propelled her into being an activist and she hasn’t stopped since.
Her first high school tour in Aotearoa in 2018 included 60 schools. On this tour, she’s scheduled to speak at 90.
“My thing is building coalitions across sectors, across cultures, across nations.
“We can’t do this unless we work together.”
The couple spend five months a year in America running their business.