Ruby Bridges

Civil rights activist

• Born: September 8, 1954
• Place of Birth: Tylertown, Mississippi

Significance: At the age of six, Ruby Bridges became a national figure in the US civil rights movement when, escorted by a phalanx of federal marshals, she became one of the first Black American children to attend an all-White elementary school in the Deep South.

Background

Ruby Nell Bridges was born September 8, 1954, in Tylertown, Mississippi, a small town near the Louisiana border. Bridges was born into the era of violence, agitation, and social change that marked the civil rights movement in the United States; she was born just four months after the Supreme Court handed down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that held that segregated state school systems were unconstitutional. But little changed in the rural Mississippi where Bridges grew up and where her parents were sharecroppers. With four children, Abon and Lucille Bridges barely made ends meet until, when Bridges was four, her father decided to move the family to New Orleans for prospects of better employment.

The family moved into the Upper Ninth Ward, one of the most celebrated of the city’s Black neighborhoods, known for its musical heritage and its street celebrations of Mardi Gras. Her father took a job as a gas station attendant, and her mother took on nighttime jobs to help with the finances.

The state of Louisiana had moved slowly in response to the Supreme Court mandate to integrate its public school system, throwing up multiple appeals until, finally, it was forced to create a protocol for admitting Black children. The state devised an entrance test that it claimed would weed out those Black students not ready for study in the all-White public schools. The test was difficult—designed, critics said, to legally maintain the state’s longstanding segregated education system. In 1960, when Bridges took the test, however, she, along with five other Black children, passed. At the insistence of her mother—Bridges’s father feared repercussions from the decision—Bridges was enrolled to attend first grade at the nearby William Frantz Elementary School with more than five hundred White students. Of the other five children, two declined the offer to attend a White school, and the other three entered a different school, McDonogh No. 19.

Life’s Work

Because of last-ditch efforts by the Louisiana state legislature to block the admission of a Black student to its public school system, Bridges did not attend school officially until November 14, 1960. Bridges was driven to school by her mother along with four federal marshals—when they approached the school and saw the huge crowd of parents and protesters outside the school, Bridges thought this was some kind of street celebration, an early Mardi Gras. The four marshals escorting the little girl, wearing her first-day-of-school dress and carrying her notebook, through the front door of the elementary school quickly became national news. A few years later, artist Norman Rockwell commemorated the moment in a famous painting he titled The Problem We All Live With; it appeared as the centerfold of Look magazine in January 1964. More than fifty years later, President Barack Obama had the painting hung just outside the Oval Office.

That day, Bridges went straight to the principal’s office and stayed there all day, as White parents swarmed the school and pulled their children out in protest—a boycott that lasted more than a week before students slowly started returning to school. Even then, Bridges spent her first year alone—only one teacher, Barbara Henry, who had grown up in Boston, agreed to teach the child. The two worked on lessons in a locked room—Bridges was not permitted to go to the cafeteria and could not go outside for recess, for fear of her safety. If she had to go the bathroom, federal marshals escorted her. Daily, she faced protesters outside the school. When one parent threatened to poison her, the school ordered Bridges to bring her lunch from home. Her father was fired from his job, and her mother struggled to find work. Over the months, Bridges struggled with insomnia and lost an alarming amount of weight. Dr. Robert Coles, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist then stationed with the army outside New Orleans, volunteered to counsel the child and the family through the traumatic effects of near-constant threats and intimidation. He would later publish widely on Bridges and how bravely she handled the strain.

By the second year, the school system began to accept desegregation. Bridges never found complete acceptance, but she never wavered from her commitment. She graduated on time from an integrated high school. Though never seeking celebrity, she emerged as an iconic figure in the civil rights movement. She and her husband, Malcom Hall, moved to Kansas City; the two lived there for more than twenty years, during which time Bridges worked as a travel agent for American Express. They returned to New Orleans in 1993. There, she became active in education reform, starting the Ruby Bridges Foundation in 1999 to encourage schools to create an environment of tolerance and respect for all students.

As racism remained a prominent sociopolitical issue into the twenty-first century, Bridges continued efforts to serve as a positive role model for tolerance, particularly for younger generations. Having published in the past, in 2020, shortly after a White police officer in Minnesota had killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, she put out a book for middle-grade readers titled This Is Your Time. In addition to sharing her story once more, the book advocates for younger readers to promote social justice and fight for change. After her next children's book, I Am Ruby Bridges, came out in 2022, the year 2024 saw the publication of the picture book Dear Ruby, Hear Our Hearts, which features letters from young people addressed to Bridges about the various struggles they faced as well as Bridges's responses.

Impact

At the age of six, like most children in America, Ruby Bridges just wanted to go to school. Racism, she said later, was a disease of adults—at six, Bridges was not interested in becoming a national hero in the civil rights movement. But she did—for that difficult first year, she never wavered, never cried publicly, and never gave in to the taunts and the threats. That courage and resilience in a child of six made Bridges an iconic figure in the struggle for Black American civil rights. In 2024, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Personal Life

Bridges and her husband raised four sons. When Bridges’s brother Malcolm was killed during a drug deal in New Orleans in 1993, Bridges and her family returned to the city to help look after her brother’s four daughters; they attended William Frantz Elementary, the school their aunt helped integrate in 1960.

Bibliography

Boyd, Herb. "Ruby Bridges: The First Black Child to Integrate a White School in the South." New York Amsterdam News, 10 Oct. 2013, pp. 32.

Bridges, Ruby. "Ruby Bridges on Turning Her Experience of Desegregating a School into a Kids' Book." Interview by Mary Louise Kelly. All Things Considered, NPR, 5 Sept. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/09/05/1121145047/ruby-bridges-on-turning-her-experience-of-desegregating-a-school-into-a-kids-boo. Accessed 26 July 2024.

Coles, Robert. The Story of Ruby Bridges. Special anniversary ed. Scholastic, 2010.

Michals, Debra. "Ruby Bridges (1954– )." National Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ruby-bridges. Accessed 26 July 2024.

Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford UP, 2001.

Richardson, Randi. "What's It Like to Live Black History? We Asked Ruby Bridges." Today, 1 Feb. 2024, www.today.com/popculture/books/ruby-bridges-story-interview-rcna135041. Accessed 26 July 2024.

Rogers, Kim Lacy. Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement. NYU P, 1992.

Rose, Steve. "Ruby Bridges: The Six-Year-Old Who Defied a Mob and Desegregated Her School." The Guardian, 6 May 2021, www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/06/ruby-bridges-the-six-year-old-who-defied-a-mob-and-desegregated-her-school. Accessed 26 July 2024.

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. 25th anniv. ed. Penguin, 2013.