The
Education of Ruby Nell
by Ruby Bridges Hall, New Orleans, LA
Take another look at the cover of this magazine. The little girl on the left is
me in November 1960, walking up the steps of William Frantz Public School in
New Orleans, the first black student at the formerly all-white elementary
school. That's me now, on the right, married, a mother of four. Forty years
separate those pictures.
Forty years that brought incredible
change in our country, forged in the crucible of the civil rights movement and
the battle to end segregation. Forty years that changed me as well.
I was born in Mississippi in 1954, the oldest child of Abon and Lucille
Bridges. That year the United States handed down its landmark decision ordering
the integration of public schools. Not that I knew anything about school at the
time. What I knew and loved was growing up on the farm my paternal grandparents
sharecropped.
It was a very hard life, though. My
parents heard there were better opportunities in the city. We moved to New
Orleans, where my father found work as a service station attendant, and my
mother took night jobs to help support our growing family.
As I got a bit older, my job was to
keep an eye on my younger brothers and sister, which wasn't too difficult.
Except for church and the long walk to the all-black school where I went to
kindergarten, our world didn't extend beyond our block. But that was all about
to change.
Under federal court order, New
Orleans public schools were finally forced to desegregate. In the spring of
1960 I took a test, along with other black kindergarteners in the city, to see
who would go to an integrated school come September. That summer my parents
learned I'd passed the test and had been selected to start first grade at
William Frantz Public School.
My mother was all for it. My father
wasn't. "We're just asking for trouble," he said. He thought things
weren't going to change, and blacks and whites would never be treated as
equals. Mama thought I would have an opportunity to get a better education if I
went to the new school - and a chance for a good job
later in life. My parents argued about it and prayed about it. Eventually my
mother convinced my father that despite the risks, they had to take this step
forward, not just for their own children, but for all black children.
A federal judge decreed that Monday,
November 14, 1960 would be the day black children in New Orleans would go to
school with white children. There were six of us chosen to integrate the city's
public school system. Two decided to stay in their old
schools. The other three were assigned to McDonough. I would be going to
William Frantz alone.
The morning of November 14 federal
marshals drove my mother and me the five blocks to William Frantz. In the car
one of the men explained that when we arrived at the school two marshals would
walk in front of us an two behind, so we'd be
protected on both sides.
That reminded me of what Mama had
taught us about God, that he is always there to protect us. "Ruby
Nell," she said as we pulled up to my new school, "don't be afraid.
There might be some people upset outside, but I'll be with you."
Sure enough, people shouted and
shook their fist when we got out of the car, but to
me it wasn't any noisier than Mardi Gras, I held my mother's hand and followed
the marshals through the crowd, up the steps into the school.
We spent that whole
day sitting in the principal's office. Through the window, I saw white
parents pointing at us and yelling, then rushing their children out of the
school. In the uproar I never got to my classroom.
The marshals drove my mother and me
to school again the next day. I tried not to pay attention to the mob. Someone
had a black doll in a coffin, and that scared me more than the nasty things
people screamed at us.
A young white woman met us inside
the building. She smiled at me. "Good morning, Ruby Nell," she said,
just like Mama except with what I later learned was a Boston accent.
"Welcome, I'm your new teacher, Mrs. Henry." She seemed nice, but I
wasn't sure how to feel about her. I'd never been taught by a white teacher
before.
Mrs. Henry took my mother and me to
her second-floor classroom. All the desk were empty
and she asked me to choose a seat. I picked one up front, and Mrs. Henry
started teaching me the letters of the alphabet.
The next morning my mother told me
she couldn't go to school with me. She had to work and look after my brothers
and sister. "The marshals will take good car of
you, Ruby Nell," Mama assured me. "Remember, if you get afraid, say
your prayers. You can pray to God anytime, anywhere. He will always hear
you."
That was how I started praying on
the way to school. The things people yelled at me didn't seem to touch me.
Prayer was my protection. After walking up the steps past the angry crowd,
though, I was glad to see Mrs. Henry. She gave me a hug, and she sat right by
my side instead of at the big teacher's desk in the front of the room. Day
after day, it was just Mrs. Henry and me, working on my lessons.
Militant segregationists, as the
news called them, took to the streets in protest, and riots erupted all over
the city. My parents shielded me as best they could, but I knew problems had
come to our family because I was going to the white school. My father was fired
from his job. The white owners of a grocery store told us not to shop there
anymore. Even my grandparents in Mississippi suffered. The owner of the land
they'd sharecropped for 25 years said everyone knew it was their granddaughter
causing trouble in New Orleans, and asked them to move.
At the same time, there were a few
white families who braved the protests and kept their children in school. But
they weren't in my class, so I didn't see them. People from around the country
who'd heard about me on the news sent letters and donations. A neighbor gave my
dad a job painting houses. Other folks baby-sat for us, watched our house to
keep away troublemakers, even walked behind the marshal's car on my way to
school. My family couldn't have made it without our friends' and neighbors'
help.
And me, I couldn't have gotten
through that year without Mrs. Henry. Sitting next to her in our classroom,
just the two of us, I was able to forget the world outside. She made school
fun. We did everything together. I couldn't go out in the schoolyard for
recess, so right in that room we played games and for exercise we did jumping
jacks to music.
I remember her explaining
integration to me and why some people were against it. "It's not easy for
people to change once they have gotten used to living a certain way," Mrs.
Henry said. "Some of them don't know any better and they're afraid. But
not everyone is like that."
Even though I was only six, I knew
what she meant. The people I passed every morning as I walked up the schools steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was
my teacher, who couldn't have been more different from them. She was one of the
most loving people I had ever known. The greatest lesson I learned that year in
Mrs. Henry's class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tried to teach us
all. Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique
in ways that go much deeper. From her window, Mrs. Henry always watched me walk
into school. One morning when I got to our classroom, she said she'd been
surprised to see me talk to the mob. "I saw your lips moving," she
said, "but I couldn't make out what you were saying to those people."
I wasn't talking to them," I
told her. "I was praying for them." Usually I prayed in the car on
the way to school, but that day I'd forgotten until I was in the crowd. Please
be with me, I'd asked God, and be with those people too. Forgive them because
they don't know what they're doing.
"Ruby Nell, you are truly
someone special," Mrs. Henry whispered, giving me an even bigger hug than
usual. She had this look on her face like my mother would get when I'd done
something to make her proud.
Another person who helped me was Dr.
Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist who happened to see me being escorted
through the crowd outside my school. Dr. Coles volunteered to work with me
through this ordeal. Soon he was coming to our house every week to talk with me
about how I was doing in school.
Really, I was doing fine. I was
always with people who wanted the best for me: my family, friends, and in
school, my teacher. The more time I spent with Mrs. Henry, the more I grew to
love her. I wanted to be like her. Soon, without realizing it, I had picked up
her Boston accent.
Neither of us missed a single day of
school that year. The crowd outside dwindled to just a few protestors, and
before I knew it, it was June. For me, first grade ended much more quietly than
it began. I said good-bye to Mrs. Henry, fully expecting her to be my teacher
again in the fall.
But when I went back to school in September, everything was different. There
were no marshals, no protestors. There were other kids - even some other black
students - in my second-grade class. And Mrs. Henry was gone. I was devastated.
Years later I found out she hadn't been invited to return to William Frantz,
and she and her husband had moved back to Boston. It was almost as if that first
year of school integration had never happened. No one talked about it. Everyone
seemed to have put that difficult time behind them.
After a while, I did the same. I
finished grade school at William Frantz and graduated from an integrated high
school, went to business school and studied travel and tourism. For 15 years I
worked as a travel agent. Eventually I married and threw myself into raising
four sons in the city I grew up in.
I didn't give much thought to the
events of my childhood until my youngest brother died in 1993. For a time, I
looked after his daughters. They happened to be students at William Frantz, and
when I took them there every morning, I was literally walking into my past,
into the same school that I'd help integrate years earlier.
I began volunteering three days a
week at William Frantz, working as a liaison between parents and the school.
Still, I had the feeling God had brought me back in touch with my past for
something beyond that. I struggled with it for a while. Finally
I got on my knees and prayed, Lord, whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing,
you'll have to show me.
Not long after that, a reporter
called the school. The psychiatrist Robert Coles had written a children's book,
The Story of Ruby Bridges; now everyone wanted to know what had happened to the
little girl in the Norman Rockwell painting (See Picture Gallery) that had
appeared in Look magazine. No one expected to find me back at William Frantz.
Dr. Coles had often written about me, but this was the first book intended for
children. To me it was God's way of keeping my story alive until I was able to
tell it myself.
One of the best parts of the story
is that I was finally reunited with my favorite teacher, Barbara Henry. She reached
me through the publisher of Dr. Coles's book, and in
1995 we saw each other in person for the first time in more than three decades.
The second she laid eyes on me, she cried, "Ruby Nell!" No one had
called me that since I was a little girl. Then we were hugging each other, just
like we used to every morning in first grade.
I didn't realize how much I had
picked up from Mrs. Henry (I still have a hard time
calling her anything else) - not only her Boston accent, but her mannerism too,
such as how she tilts her head and gestures her hands when she talks. She
showed me a tiny, dog-eared photo of me with my front teeth missing that she'd
kept all these years. "I used to look at that picture and wonder how you
were," she said. "I told my kids about you so often you were like
part of my family."
We have stayed a part of each
other's lives ever since. It turns out that because of what I went through on
the front lines of the battle for school integration, people recognize my name
and are eager to hear what I have to say about racism and education today. I
speak to groups around the country, and when I visit schools, Mrs. Henry often
comes with me. We tell kids our story and talk about the lessons of the past
and how we can still learn from them today - especially that every child is a
unique human being fashioned by God.
I tell them that another important
thing I learned in first grade is that schools can be a place to bring people
together - kids of all races and backgrounds. That's the work I focus on now,
connecting our children through their schools. It's my way of continuing what
God set in motion 40 years ago when he led me up the steps of William Frantz
Public School and into a new world with my teacher, Mrs. Henry - a world that
under his protection has reached for beyond just the two of us in that
classroom.
~ Ruby Bridges
As published in Guideposts
March 2000