Ruby Bridges: 50 Years Later, I'm Still Trying to Integrate My School
[Ruby Bridges lives in New Orleans and runs the Ruby Bridges Foundation, dedicated to educating children on social justice issues.]
On the morning of my first day of first grade at a new school, 50 years ago Sunday, U.S. marshals knocked on my family's door. They had been sent by the president of the United States, they said, to take me to school. I was 6 years old, and I had no idea who these men in uniform were. Nor did I know what would happen that day as I became the first black student to attend William Frantz Public School in New Orleans - and one of the first to integrate an elementary school in the South.
Our friends, family and neighbors had been at the house that morning, helping my mother get me ready. I was wearing a white dress with white bows. Many people who have never met me or who didn't see me that day might remember that outfit, too: It's in Norman Rockwell's painting "The Problem We All Live With," in which I am perpetually the 6-year-old girl in a white dress and pigtails.
The problem Rockwell alludes to has been part of our history since the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas more than 400 years ago, and it is one that each of us still confronts. Even today, the painting reminds me of my purpose in life. That purpose can be found in the shell of the William Frantz school building in New Orleans's Upper Ninth Ward. The building has sat empty since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina five years ago. Before the storm, the school was predominantly black - the school that I integrated by force, under guard by federal marshals, slowly returned from being mixed-race to being segregated, by economics and demographics this time....
Read entire article at WaPo
On the morning of my first day of first grade at a new school, 50 years ago Sunday, U.S. marshals knocked on my family's door. They had been sent by the president of the United States, they said, to take me to school. I was 6 years old, and I had no idea who these men in uniform were. Nor did I know what would happen that day as I became the first black student to attend William Frantz Public School in New Orleans - and one of the first to integrate an elementary school in the South.
Our friends, family and neighbors had been at the house that morning, helping my mother get me ready. I was wearing a white dress with white bows. Many people who have never met me or who didn't see me that day might remember that outfit, too: It's in Norman Rockwell's painting "The Problem We All Live With," in which I am perpetually the 6-year-old girl in a white dress and pigtails.
The problem Rockwell alludes to has been part of our history since the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas more than 400 years ago, and it is one that each of us still confronts. Even today, the painting reminds me of my purpose in life. That purpose can be found in the shell of the William Frantz school building in New Orleans's Upper Ninth Ward. The building has sat empty since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina five years ago. Before the storm, the school was predominantly black - the school that I integrated by force, under guard by federal marshals, slowly returned from being mixed-race to being segregated, by economics and demographics this time....