The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
On Thursday I had the joy of meeting Ruby Bridges before she spoke at Palo Verde High School at the invitation of the African American Museum of Southern Arizona. When Ruby Bridges was 6, she entered the first grade at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.
We’re the same age. First day of first grade, my mom handed me my Quick Draw McGraw lunchbox, told me to behave myself and sent me off to school in a sweater I hated. I walked up to Myers Elementary School all by myself.
On Ruby’s first day, her mom made her wear a coat she didn’t care for either. Her mom told her she was going to a new school and she better behave. And that’s all she said about it. Then came the knock at the door. “We are federal marshals and we have been sent here by the President of the United States to escort you to school today.”
When I arrived at my school, I was cheerfully greeted by my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Logan, outside her classroom door.
When Ruby arrived at the all-white William Frantz Elementary School, her federal marshals escorted her past the gauntlet of white parents who had dropped their kids off and hung around to yell racist epithets at the 6-year-old child. The federal marshals told Ruby, ”Ruby, walk straight ahead and don’t look back.”
Permit me to digress and note Arizona just looked back and elected Tom Horne, a racist Mexican studies book-banning, white-washer of history, to be Arizona’s state Superintendent of Public Instruction. Again. This time Horne ran on banning critical race theory, a theory that is not taught in any of the schools the bilious one will oversee.
Hundreds of us gave Ruby Bridges our awestruck attention as AAMSAZ Board Chair Bob Elliott hosted a joyful, revealing fireside chat with her. We heard Ruby’s courage, humor and inspiring wisdom. We heard history. We heard truth.
My first day, I sat in my new classroom with 26 rambunctious kids, a rainbow of military kids and south siders and we learned to say the pledge of allegiance. I pledged allegiance to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for all. Ruby sat with her mother in the white principal’s office her entire first day. The school was sorting out what to do with her.
Ruby was taught by Barbara Henry, a white teacher who had been imported from Boston because teachers in Louisiana would rather quit than teach a 6-year-old black child. If that historical fact makes Tom Horne or any white children feel bad I applaud those children for experiencing a normal reaction to cruel bigotry.
Ruby was taught alone by Miss Henry in Miss Henry’s classroom for the entire year. No white child, home-schooled in the art of hate by their parents, wanted to share a classroom with Ruby Bridges.
At this point I want to warn any of Tom Horne’s Caucasian supporters that if any of this history makes your children feel bad, that’s a good thing. Possessing knowledge of the truth, and blessed with empathy, they may be inspired to effect positive change. Perhaps you find positive change threatening and you prefer to seal your children up in a cocoon of untroubled ignorance.
Under Horne will it be safe for teachers to teach the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that ordered the integration of schools like the school Ruby attended? Would anyone be surprised if Horne, the antediluvian racist who shamelessly scapegoated Tucson’s smart Mexican American Studies program, crusade to protect white students from troubling stories like Ruby’s?
White parents pulled their children from the school that welcomed 6-year-old Ruby.
Ruby noticed Miss Henry looked just like the people in the mob outside who were screaming at her. More than half a century later, her first-grade teacher Barbara Henry is still her best friend. “Because my white teacher showed me her heart, I could not judge her by the color of her skin but by the content of her character.”
Some parents in Arizona think their children can’t handle the truth about race in America, that now is not the time to teach such truths to our children.
When Beverely Elliott, executive director of the African American Museum of Southern Arizona, addressed the audience at Palo Verde High, she said, “We are a movement, not just a museum.” We felt the vitality of that movement Thursday night with every heartrending and inspiring truth spoken by the gracious, unshakeable Ruby Bridges.
May your movement and your wonderful museum flourish. May the stories be told, the truths taught and as a little child was once advised, may we all walk straight ahead together, and never look back.
