RUBY BRIDGES, THE CIVIL RIGHTS ICON

  RUBY BRIDGES, THE CIVIL RIGHTS ICON

Lucille Bridges, the mother of Civil Rights icon Ruby Bridges, died on Tuesday, November 10, 2020. She was 86 years old. Before Ruby took part in a Zoom call hosted by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, on Wednesday night November 11,2020, she honored her mother’s courage. Lucille, she said, wanted her children to have “a better education than she had.” 

Lucille, Ruby added, was “a champion for change and her actions “altered the course of many lives.” 

An article by Leah Asmelash of CNN on November 14, 2020 tells how Ruby Bridges became a trailblazer when she was just six years old.

On her way to William Frantz Elementary School to begin first grade on that November morning in 1960, six-year-old Ruby was escorted by four Federal Marshalls. All along the way to school a mob of white people kept yelling and they “hurled insults at her.”

“I really wasn’t aware of what was going on,” Ruby told NPR in 2010. She did not understand what the white people were saying to or about her.

That year Judge J. Skelley Wright had ordered desegregation of public schools in New Orleans. But the Orleans Parish School Board had convinced the judge to require black students to apply for transfer to all-white schools, thus limiting de-segregation.

She had no idea of the developments. Her parents just told her that she would attend a new school and that she should behave.

As soon as the little girl “entered the school and went to her classroom all the other children had withdrawn. For the rest of the school year it was just her and the teacher.” 

The crowds continued to harass her on her way to school each day, but her teacher, Barbara Henry, a white woman, continued to inspire her. The child realized that although Mrs. Henry looked like the other white people outside, she was soft-spoken and gentle, Domenica Bongiovanni mentioned in her article on Ruby Bridges in USA Today.    

One day, however, Ruby was “really, really frightened when the white mob brought “a small baby’s coffin with a Black doll inside.” The experience caused her to have nightmares.

But she made it through the darkness and turmoil of that year and the next year she went on to the second grade.

In the following weeks and months there was a great deal of retaliation within the community against her family. “Grocery stores refused to sell to her mother; her father, Abon lost his job, and the strain of the experiences on the family caused a breakup of the marriage.”

But Ruby survived the difficulties. She overcame them and even today she continues to inspire many people.

A painting by the American illustrator Norman Rockwell, (who is famous for his illustrations of American life and culture) that commemorates Ruby’s walk to school, hangs in the White House in the USA. It is titled “The problem we all live with”. 

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