School Days in 1960
By Tom Kertes

Ruby Bridges is no professional author. Then, again, she doesn’t have to be.
When you tell a story as fascinating, as that Bridges tells in Through My Eyes, a no-frills, less-is-more style is probably the best way to go.
Through My Eyes, much like David Copperfield, starts in the womb, with Ruby’s birth on September 8, 1954. At first, hers was a simple life on a Mississippi farm in the loving fold of a poor sharecropping family. But, at the age of four the Bridges moved to the old seaport city of New Orleans where, two years later, the “Civil Rights movement came knocking at the door and history pushed in and swept me up in a whirlwind.”
Too many years after Brown v. Board of Education, schools finally began to get desegregated even in the deepest South. Ruby was one of the few African American children in New Orleans who passed the qualifying test for attending a white school.
Thus, on November 14, 1960, a tiny, six-year old black child with a gleaming white bow in her pigtails, surrounded by federal marshals, walked through a mob of screaming segregationists and into her school. She was the first African American child to do so. It was Ruby. She was making history. And it was scary.
The book, well-illustrated by dramatic quotes and pictures from current newspaper clippings, shows “some 150 whites clustered along the sidewalk across William Frantz School, chanting obscenities and throwing things”. A wall of policemen protects the tiny child but only half-heartedly at best. “They were not exactly in favor of integration themselves,” Bridges said. “You could never be confident in their support.”
All week long, screaming mothers rush into school, arguing loudly while pointing at Ruby, taking their children out of William Frantz in droves. One woman shouts daily, “I’m going to poison you! I’ll find a way!”
Ruby, though suffering horrible nightmares, perseveres. She has first grade all to herself as no white child dares to attend class with her. A few who try get ostracized right out of town. “I was not even sure what all the commotion was all about,” said Bridges. “Not until the end of the year, when some white children would drop by once in a while. The light dawned on me one day when a little boy refused to play with me. ‘My mama said not to because you’re a nigger,’ he said.”
By second grade, the school is integrated and no one says anything. “But my teacher clearly did not like me,” said Bridges. “I guess, in her eyes, this was somehow all my fault.”
Bridges, now a lecturer nationwide, has established the Ruby Bridges Foundation to help inner city schools. “I go back to William Frantz,” she said. “The kids are being re-segregated again. There aren’t enough resources for them. And why is that?” “As a society, we must do something about education,” added Bridges. “If kids of different races are to grow up to live and work together in harmony, then they are going to have to begin at the beginning: in school.”#

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