The first day of school can be scary. New people, new rules, a new environment. Now, add a violent mob, federal marshals, and death threats. This is what six-year-old Ruby Bridges faced on her first day of her new, all-white elementary school.
Ruby Bridges was born in 1954, the same year as the historic Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that struck down the constitutionality of segregated schools. However, even after the ruling, segregated schools still proved rampant throughout the South, finding various ways to deter black students from integrating their buildings. Black students in New Orleans, for example, had to pass a near-impossible test to attend an all-white school. Ruby Bridges was one of only six African American students in New Orleans to pass this test, and the only one of these six to attend William Frantz Elementary School.
Dressed in clothing her parents could not afford and surrounded by a team of US federal marshals, Ruby Bridges made her way up the steps of her new school with her mother on Nov. 14, 1960.
One of the marshals later recalled that Ruby “marched along like a little soldier,” past the angry mob threatening her and throwing things outside the school. Ruby remembers thinking that the crowd had something to do with Mardi Gras, unable at six years old to grasp the reality of her situation.
Having made it safely past the violent mob, Ruby found herself in an empty school. The rest of the students were pulled out by their parents, many of them protesting Ruby’s presence by boycotting for days, even weeks, after her first day. Others expressed their anger through more direct means: One woman threatened to poison Ruby’s food (prompting a strict no-cafeteria-food policy for Ruby); another presented Ruby with a coffin holding a black doll.
Teachers, too, protested integration. Only one teacher, Barbara Henry, was willing to take in Ruby, providing both academic and emotional support and forming a friendship that would last long into Ruby’s adult life. Due to threats by white parents, Ruby would remain the only student in Henry’s class that year.
Though the protests died down as time went on, the marshals remained and the stress did not subside. The Bridges’s brave stand against segregation cost Ruby’s father his job and her grandparents to be cast off the land they had worked for over 25 years as sharecroppers. Little Ruby began seeing a child psychologist, having stopped eating her lunches and experiencing more frequent nightmares. The Bridges family was even banned from the local grocery store, the white owners refusing to allow them entry due to Ruby’s presence at the school.
But Ruby persisted. She sat in class with white students her second year and walked to school without the protection of US marshals. William Frantz Elementary School even saw the enrollment of a few other black students that second year.
Written by Annie Ross, a student at Northwestern University.