YOUNGSTOWN – Mahoning County Prosecutor Gina DeGenova couldn’t help being deeply moved by the trials and tribulations a black high school student suffered decades ago, trying to see that the nation lived up to its promises of democracy.

“Minnijean really moved me based on her experiences,” DeGenova said, referring to Minnijean Brown Trickey, 82, one of nine black students who integrated the all-white Central High School in September 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

For her efforts, Brown Trickey suffered numerous indignities and threats as well as continual harassment while also being largely ignored and shunned throughout the first half of the 1957-58 school year. In February 1958, she was expelled for “verbal retaliation” after standing up to one of her white tormentors, then she finished the year at a school in New York.

The civil rights and social justice advocate and DeGenova met each other for the first time on a recent five-day Sojourn to the Past traveling American history bus journey they took through parts of the South. They stopped in Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and Memphis, Tennessee, and met various civil rights icons at each location.

Those who shared their stories with the group were Brown Trickey; Gwen Webb, a former Birmingham police officer who also was part of the April 1963 Children’s March; Sarah Collins Rudolph and Lisa McNair, both of whom lost older sisters in the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; and several members of the Vernon F. Dahmer family. Dahmer was a strong voting rights advocate in Hattiesburg before members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home, resulting in his death Jan. 10, 1966, at age 57.

VALLEY SOJOURNERS

An estimated 90 police officers, district attorneys and their staff, social workers, community nonprofit group members and others, mostly from the San Francisco Bay area, embarked on the all-adult journey. During other times of the year, Sojourn to the Past, based in Millbrae, California, takes high school students to key civil rights sites in the South.

Those from the Mahoning Valley who took the journey also were Penny Wells, Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past’s executive director, and Alan Rodges, the prosecutor’s office’s director of communications and community outreach.

Perhaps the most poignant and heartbreaking aspect of Brown Trickey’s story for DeGenova was the pain she suffered merely for “going to school,” something for which she was entitled but where Brown Trickey suffered because she “looked different from the other students.” DeGenova added that she would not have sent her children to school under the circumstances Brown Trickey and the other eight blacks faced.

During lighter moments on the journey, DeGenova and Brown Trickey also discussed ordinary topics such as their children (Brown Trickey has six), though it was apparent to the local prosecutor that Brown Trickey remains affected by what she endured 66 years ago as a 16-year-old who simply wanted a better education.

“She still has her scars, but she uses her scars to teach,” DeGenova observed.

LEGACY MUSEUM

Another major impactful element of the trip for DeGenova was her visit to The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which was built in Montgomery a short distance from a rail station where tens of thousands of black children and adults were trafficked in the 1800s.

The museum provides a comprehensive history of the transatlantic and domestic slave trades, the 12-year Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the more than 4,000 lynchings up to 1950, codified racial segregation during the Jim Crow era and mass incarceration in the 20th and 21st centuries. A haunting display includes shelves filled with jars of dirt that marked spots where blacks had been lynched; besides being hung, many of them also were shot, drowned or burned. Several of the crimes occurred in Ohio, including that of William Taylor, who was lynched in 1878 in Sandusky.

Calling it “an era of heartbreak,” DeGenova said the museum amply and dramatically displayed the lack of “basic human rights like what we should have.”

In addition, she was significantly moved emotionally by having met McNair and Collins Rudolph, whose sisters, Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins, were two of the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. Collins Rudolph, now often referred to as “the fifth little girl,” was partially blinded and seriously injured in the attack, along with about 20 others.

Also, the sacrifices for the greater good made by the Dahmer family, along with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a longtime Baptist minister who was pivotal in desegregating Birmingham, left indelible marks on her, she continued.

KINDNESS, DIGNITY, RESPECT

DeGenova said the journey reinforced for her the importance and necessity of community engagement and outreach – especially regarding children – as well as the value of meeting regularly with constituents and supporting local diversion programs to help certain offenders.

Even though her job is in part to hold lawbreakers accountable for their actions, the southern journey anchored her general understanding of how pivotal it is to treat others with kindness and dignity, DeGenova explained.

As for Rodges, he said: “It’s hard to tell what impacted me the most, but it was moving to walk on the same path as the Children’s March and to be in the shoes of Martin Luther King in Memphis.”

More specifically, he was touched by the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and march along Beale Street on which many of them carried signs that read, “I am a Man.” That simple phrase highlighted the fact that, more than anything else, the striking workers – who earned about $1.60 per hour, had no health care benefits and were not paid for sick days – wanted to be treated with dignity and respect, Rodges observed.

STRUGGLE CONTINUES

The five-day journey also brought closer to the fore the realization that the struggle for equality continues to be a work in progress. Many of the pervasive problems that kept lots of people separated from one another in the 1950s and 1960s continue today, he said.

“We’re still working to right the wrongs presented in that time period,” Rodges added.

In addition, Sojourn gave Rodges an opportunity to connect more closely to certain stories he had heard from his grandparents and other family members.

“It opened my eyes to the atrocities they (and others of their generation) went through to get (us) to this point,” he said.

Rodges added that the Sojourn experience has cemented his desire to further connect with schools, youth and the community to, among other things, bridge chasms between some community members and law enforcement, such as helping them to view police officers in a more positive light.

Wells praised San Francisco police Chief William “Bill” Scott, who’s from Birmingham, for encouraging some of his officers to take the journey.

Wells, a longtime civil rights activist, said she also hopes the officers who learned the lessons taught by those who fought on the front lines for civil rights, fairness and equality will better understand and relate especially to those they deal with who are suffering from trauma and carrying emotional baggage.

“I hope they will be saying, ‘I can see you better and where you come from,'” she said.

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