Civil rights activist shares childhood journey to integrate schools

The girl attended kindergarten in an all-Black school the year before. Her life changed when she walked out of her house that November day with her mother — escorted by four tall, white serious-looking U.S. Marshals sent by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to protect her.

Ruby Nell Bridges Hall, 68, an American civil rights activist, took several hundred people at Palo Verde High Magnet School auditorium Thursday night on a journey through her eyes when she was an innocent child going through school integration. The event was “A Fireside Chat with Ruby Bridges,” presented by the African American Museum of Southern Arizona.

Despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, the law was not carried out in the South and other parts of the country.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP, a civil rights organization began sending members door-to-door into certain Black neighborhoods in search of 6-year-olds to integrate white schools. “My parents were told it would allow their children a better education and to go to college,” recalls Bridges. Her parents — Abon and Lucille Bridges whose families were sharecroppers, making education a luxury — wanted a college opportunity for their children, but her dad was reluctant because he knew racism and worried for her safety. Her mother insisted. “I come from a very long line of strong Black women,” said Bridges to a crowd that responded with applause.

The NAACP signed up 150 families who were willing to send their children into white schools. The children needed to pass a test to go to two schools, and six girls qualified to go to those schools in “the most racist parts of the city,” recalled Bridges. People visited her family for two weeks bringing gifts for Ruby and congratulating her parents.

When the time came to go to William Frantz Elementary School, the other two girls who were to go with Ruby did not go. Ruby explained that she could not say no because at that time she was raised in an African American family where you “were pretty much seen and not heard.” She said she wanted young people to understand the family dynamics and the times.

The marshals instructed Ruby and her mother that when they would arrive at the school they were to get out of the car and walk without looking back. However, when they walked from their home to the car, “all of the neighbors got off their porches and walked behind the car. People were clapping.”

As the car approached the school, Ruby saw “white people screaming and throwing things and officers on horseback.” Ruby said she thought it was Mardi Gras and they were part of the parade. She heard people chanting: “2, 4, 6, 8 we don’t want to integrate.” She said she didn’t know what the word “integrate” meant, and she knew the chanting rhymed and as a “6-year-old, we jumped rope to rhymes.”

Once at the school, a marshal opened the car door and she got out and didn’t look back. She walked to the principal’s office with her mother and the marshals remained outside the office. “People were shouting and pointing at me. I could see through a window. At one point, I thought I am so smart everyone came to see this 6-year-old girl. This must be college.” The building was nicer, cleaner and bigger, she thought as she saw her reflection on the shiny floor.

The two stayed in the office the entire day and when the marshals drove them home, her mother looked at the news on TV and questioned if she did the right thing. Her teacher, Barbara Henry, a white Boston native, was turned away from the school and other teachers quit because they did not want to teach Black children. She said later some in the crowd were carrying guns.

The following day the white crowd grew larger at the school. Ruby was sent to an empty classroom and was greeted by Henry who looked like the white people yelling outside. “I was hesitant. She looked like them but she wasn’t like them. She taught me and she showed me her heart,” recalled the young Bridges who was escorted with her mother the rest of the year by the marshals to school.

Ruby had no friends and did not eat cafeteria food because there was talk that she would be poisoned. Specially-made food was brought to Ruby, who at one point stopped eating, and hid the food throughout the classroom in hopes she would be allowed in the cafeteria where she could meet other children and make friends. One day, she met a boy and she wanted to play but the boy told her he could not play with her because his mother told him not to play with her. That hurt Ruby, and on that day she learned what racism meant.

In second grade, Ruby was in a classroom with other students. She was taught by a teacher who did not want to teach her when she was in first grade. The teacher reprimanded Ruby because Ruby spoke with a Boston accent that she picked up from her first-grade teacher. She spoke with a Boston accent in a classroom full of children with Southern accents.

Ruby and her family faced hardships in their struggles for integration, including her father losing his job as a mechanic, a grocery store refusing to sell to her mother and her “share-cropping grandparents were evicted from the farm where they had lived for a quarter-century,” according to Debra Michals in a biography for the National Women’s History Museum.

After graduating from a desegregated high school, Bridges became a travel agent, married and had four sons. In the mid-1990s, she reunited with her first teacher and did speaking engagements together. Later, Ruby wrote six books about her experiences, established The Ruby Bridges Foundation to promote tolerance and create change through education, and was invited in 2011 by President Barack Obama to the White House to view a painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” by Norman Rockwell of her as a child integrating William Frantz Elementary School, wrote Michals.

Bridges said what protected her the most was “the innocence of a child.”

“Each baby comes with a special gift. We adults are responsible for the racism we see in the world. We are being divided. The us and the them is good and evil,” said Bridges.

“Look at what is happening today. It is evil who goes into our schools and shoots our babies. .... Evil will use you to do your dirty work. The good news is that so does good. We need to protect our babies,” said Bridges, telling the audience that she lost a son who was murdered by evil. He was with friends and was shot 11 times.

“My message became even clearer to me. Our babies aren’t responsible for this. It is us. I urge you to come together and do better than we have done,” said Bridges.