Ruby Bridges

Sixty years ago, Lucille and Abon Bridges gave their 6-year-old seemingly mundane advice as she set off for first grade. 

“What they said is, ‘Ruby, you’re going to go to a new school today, and you better behave.’ And quite frankly, that’s what I was focusing on,” Ruby Bridges said, recalling her historic first day.

She would soon find her first day would be anything but normal as she became the first African American student to attend then-all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana, six years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, as New Orleans sought to integrate its schools.

Escorted by “four very tall white men,” later identified as U.S. Marshals sent by the president, Bridges said she went to her first day at the neighborhood school she had previously been barred from attending. There she was met with crowds of people shouting outside the school. Unaware that the angry crowd was there to object to her attendance based on the color of her skin, 6-year-old Bridges related the scene to the only similar experience she knew: Mardi Gras.

“They were throwing things and shouting, that happens at Mardi Gras,” Bridges recalled. “So I wasn’t afraid because I was thinking I was seeing something very different.”

“What protected me during that time was the innocence of a child,” she said.

For her first year, Bridges would be the sole student in her class taught by Barbara Henry. But eventually, school life became more normal after Bridges and others broke through barriers.

“No one really talked about it anymore,” she said. “I grew up with my closest friends not even knowing who I was and what I had gone through. Until this very day, people that I graduated from high school with are shocked.”

It was only years later that the significance and importance of what she experienced began to sink in, she said.

“I grew up thinking it was something that just happened in my neighborhood, on my street, in my very small community. I didn’t realize until I was about 18 that this incident actually changed the face of education across the country,” she said.

The barrier Bridges broke shifted the dynamic of schooling in the U.S. Her family’s sacrifices, ultimately leading to her father losing his job, had “far reaching consequences well beyond” Bridges’s life, said Traci Parker, an associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

Even after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, schools and housing remained “two of the most segregated spheres in American society,” Parker said.

“I think it’s fair to say that if it wasn’t for you guys, I wouldn’t be here today,” then-President Obama told Bridges when she visited the White House, where Norman Rockwell’s painting depicting her first day at school was on display.

“I said to him … ‘you are right,’ ” Bridges said. “We are all standing on the shoulders of others who paved the way, who made sacrifices, gave their lives.”

Bridges called meeting Obama, the first African American U.S. president, “one of the highlights” of her life. 

“It wasn’t just about he and I meeting. It was about the time between us. It was about all of those sacrifices that so many people made, both Black and white people, that died and gave their lives for this to happen,” she said.

Bridges continued her activism, sharing her story with students across the country for more than 25 years. She said she decided to do so upon becoming a mother herself and found that when she spoke to students they connected to her story.

“Kids realized that this didn’t happen a long, long time ago, that it was something that was very recent. That I wasn’t this very old woman, walking on a cane,” she said. “But I also believe that what they connected to was the child, that 6-year-old child that they were seeing in the photographs, and watched in the movie, and read about in the books. They connected to that.”

Every kid, she said, related to an experience of being alienated by their peers. What confused them was trying to make sense of how this happened to a child by the hands of the “grown-ups that are supposed to keep us safe.”

“I had a very unique opportunity to try to explain to them that racism doesn’t have a place in their hearts and in their minds and that they should allow themselves an opportunity to get to know one another,” Bridges said.

But while she recognizes the years of progress since her first day of school, Bridges acknowledged there is still work to be done. It is an era of “limbo,” as Parker, the professor, defined it.

“We’re in this limbo where we can see the progress of the civil rights movement but recognize we still have so far to go,” Parker said.

Bridges said she is moved by the nationwide protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May. Protesters of all different nationalities participated, which she said speaks to the legacy set by civil rights activists 60 years before them. 

For those protesters, she wrote a letter in the form of a forthcoming book titled, “This is Your Time.” It is a letter to the next generation continuing to fight against racial injustices, a letter to the young Americans who give her hope — many of whom she had the opportunity to reach though her talks at schools.

“I am hopeful because I have always believed that if we are going to get past our racial differences it’s going to come from our young people,” Bridges said. “I always believed that, and I feel very blessed that through my story I’ve had an opportunity to connect with kids in school for over 25 years.”

— Rebecca Klar