Background

Ruby Nell Bridges was born on September 8, 1954, in Tylertown, Mississippi, to Abon and Lucille Bridges. She grew up on the farm her parents and grandparents sharecropped in Mississippi.

When she was four years old, her parents moved to New Orleans, hoping for a better life in a bigger city. Her father got a job as a gas station attendant and her mother took night jobs to help support their growing family. Soon, young Bridges had two younger brothers and a younger sister.

Education

In 1954, just four months before Bridges was born, the Supreme Court ruled that legally mandated segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment, making it unconstitutional. But the landmark Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, didn’t lead to immediate change. Schools in the mostly Southern states where segregation was enforced by law often resisted integration, and New Orleans was no different.

Bridges had attended an all-Black school for kindergarten, but as the next school year began, New Orleans' all-White schools were required to enroll Black students - this was six years after the Brown decision. Bridges was one of six Black girls in kindergarten who were chosen to be the first such students. The children had been given both educational and psychological tests to ensure they could succeed since many White people thought Black people were less intelligent.

Her family was not sure they wanted their daughter to be subjected to the backlash that would occur upon Bridges' entrance into an otherwise all-White school. Her mother, though, became convinced that it would improve her child's educational prospects. After much discussion, both parents agreed to allow Bridges to take the risk of integrating a White school for "all black children."

On that November morning in 1960, Bridges was the only Black child assigned to the William Frantz Elementary School. The first day, a crowd shouting angrily surrounded the school. Bridges and her mother entered the building with the help of four federal marshals and spent the day sitting in the principal’s office.

By the second day, all the White families with children in the first-grade class had withdrawn them from school. In addition, the first-grade teacher had opted to resign rather than teach a Black child. An educator named Barbara Henry was called to take over the class. Although she did not know it would be integrated, Henry supported that arrangement and taught Bridges as a class of one for the rest of the year.

Henry did not allow Bridges to play on the playground for fear for her safety. She also forbade Bridges from eating in the cafeteria due to concerns that someone might poison the first grader. In essence, Bridges was segregated - even if it was for her own safety - from White students.

Bridges' integration of William Frantz Elementary School received national media attention. News coverage of her efforts brought the image of the little girl escorted to school by federal marshals into the public consciousness. Artist Norman Rockwell illustrated Bridges' walk to school for a 1964 Look magazine cover, titling it "The Problem We All Live With."

When Bridges began second grade, the anti-integration protests at William Frantz Elementary continued. More Black students had enrolled in the school, and the White students had returned. Henry was asked to leave the school, prompting a move to Boston. As Bridges worked her way through elementary school, her time at William Frantz became less difficult - she no longer elicited such intense scrutiny - and she spent the rest of her education in integrated settings.

Bridges' entire family faced reprisals because of her integration efforts. Her father was fired after White patrons of the gas station where he worked threatened to take their business elsewhere. Abon Bridges would mostly remain jobless for five years. In addition to his struggles, Bridges' paternal grandparents were forced off their farm.

Bridges' parents divorced when she was 12. The Black community stepped in to support the Bridges family, finding a new job for Abon and babysitters for Bridges' four younger siblings.

During this tumultuous time, Bridges found a supportive counselor in child psychologist Robert Coles. He had seen the news coverage about her and admired the first-grader's courage, so he arranged to include her in a study of Black children who had desegregated public schools. Coles became a long-term counselor, mentor, and friend. Her story was included in his 1964 classic "Children of Crises: A Study of Courage and Fear" and his 1986 book "The Moral Life of Children."

Career

Bridges graduated from an integrated high school and went to work as a travel agent. By that time, the neighborhood around William Frantz Elementary had become populated by mostly Black residents. Due to White flight - the movement of White people from areas growing more ethnically diverse to suburbs often populated by White residents - the once integrated school had become segregated again, attended largely by low-income Black students. Because her nieces attended William Frantz, Bridges returned as a volunteer. She then founded the Ruby Bridges Foundation. The foundation "promotes and encourages the values of tolerance, respect, and appreciation of all differences," according to the group's website. Its mission is to "change society through the education and inspiration of children." Institutionalized racism leads to the economic and social conditions under which foundations such as Bridges' are needed.

In 1995, Coles wrote a biography of Bridges for young readers. Titled "The Story of Ruby Bridges," the book thrust Bridges back into the public eye. That same year, she appeared on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," where she was reunited with her first-grade teacher. Both women reflected on the role they played in each other's lives. Each described the other as a hero. Bridges had modeled courage, while Henry had supported her and taught her how to read, which became the student's lifelong passion. Moreover, Henry had served as an important counterbalance to the mobs of racist White people who tried to intimidate Bridges as she arrived at school each day. Bridges included Henry in her foundation work and in joint speaking appearances.

Bridges wrote about her experiences integrating William Frantz in 1999's "Through My Eyes," which won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award. In 2001, she received a Presidential Citizens Medal, and in 2009, she wrote a memoir called "I Am Ruby Bridges." The following year, the U.S. House of Representatives honored her courage with a resolution celebrating the 50th anniversary of her first-grade integration.

In 2011, Bridges visited the White House and then-President Obama, where she saw a prominent display of Norman Rockwell’s painting "The Problem We All Live With." President Obama thanked Bridges for her efforts. Bridges, in an interview after the meeting with White House archivists, reflected on examining the painting as she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the first United States Black president: "The girl in that painting at 6 years old knew absolutely nothing about racism. I was going to school that day. But, the lesson that I took away that year in an empty school building was that... we should never look at a person and judge them by the color of their skin. That's the lesson that I learned in first grade."

Achievements

• Ruby Bridges is particularly known as the civil rights activist, as well as the author of books about her experience at segregated New Orlean school.
  
  In 2000, Ruby was made an honorary deputy marshal in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. She was honored as a Hero Against Racism at the 12th annual Anti-Defamation League "Concert Against Hate." In 2006, The Alameda Unified School District in California named a new elementary school for Ruby Bridges. The statue of Bridges was unveiled in the courtyard of William Frantz Elementary School in 2014.

Works

More photos

• book

  • This Is Your Time

    (Written as a letter from civil rights activist and icon R...)

    2020
  • Through My Eyes

    (In November 1960, all of America watched as a tiny six-ye...)

    1999
  • Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story

    (In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked through an angr...)

    2009

Religion

Bridges is a Christian. She had personally felt the hand of God in her life, recounting a time when she was experienced vivid dreams in the months before her father's unexpected death, and a time when she rushed to the emergency room only to meet the nurse who had cared for her son before he died.

Views

A lifelong activist for racial equality, in 1999, Ruby established The Ruby Bridges Foundation to promote tolerance and create change through education. In 2000, she was made an honorary deputy marshal in a ceremony in Washington, DC.

Bridges currently has her own website and speaks at schools and various events. For example, Bridges spoke at a school district in Houston in 2018, where she told students: "I refuse to believe there’s more evil out there in the world than good, but we all have to stand up and make a choice. The truth is, you need each other. If this world is going to get better, you’re going to have to change it."

Bridges' talks are still vital today because over 60 years after Brown, public and private schools in the United States are still de facto segregated. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers, said: "Schools remain segregated today because neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated. Raising achievement of low-income black children requires residential integration, from which school integration can follow."

Bridges laments the current situation, saying that "schools are reverting” to being segregated along racial lines. As a recent New York Times article noted: "(M)ore than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or nonwhite."

Despite this, Bridges sees hope for a better, more equal and just future, saying that a more integrated society lies with children: "Kids really don’t care about what their friends look like. Kids come into the world with clean hearts, fresh starts. If we are going to get through our differences, it’s going to come through them."

Quotations: "I believe it doesn't do yourself any good to hate."

"Evil looks like you and I. I know what evil looks like, and I know that it comes in all shades and colors."

"Racism is a form of hate. We pass it on to our young people. When we do that, we are robbing children of their innocence."

"What we, as African Americans, stood on was our faith."

"You cannot look at a person and judge him or her by the color of their skin."

"You cannot look at a person and tell whether they're good or bad."

"Racism is a grown-up disease, and we should stop using our kids to spread it."

"The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school's steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn't have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known."

"My message is really that racism has no place in the hearts and minds of our children."

Personality

Ruby Bridges is not a TV person. But she likes old movies, shows on Nick at Nite. Bridges has a sweet tooth - it's her weakness. She loves bread pudding, banana pudding, sweet potato pies. But she also likes gumbo.

Interests

• Gardening

• Politicians

  Hillary Clinton

• Writers

  Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza

• Music & Bands

  Maze, Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye

Connections

In 1984, Bridges married Malcolm Hall in New Orleans. She later became a full-time parent to their four sons, one of whom is now deceased. When her youngest brother was killed in a 1993 shooting, Bridges took care of his four girls as well.

Father:

Abon Bridges

Mother:

Lucille Bridges

Spouse:

Malcolm Hall

(married 1984)

Friend:

Barbara Henry

Ruby really liked her teacher Barbara Henry. They became good friends during that first year at the newly integrated school.

References

• The Story Of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles
  1995