The Education of Ruby Bridges ~ Black History Month

[sheshe2]

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.

snip

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.

http://www.rubybridges.com/story.html

Look at you, such beauty, grace and dignity from one so small.

Your strength and spirit that day made you the woman you are today. You showed us all how it can be done, our heads held high and proud.

~ Thank you sweet girl.















Ruby Bridges's first few weeks at Frantz School were not easy ones. Several times she was confronted with blatant racism in full view of her federal escorts. On her second day of school, a woman threatened to poison her. After this, the federal marshals allowed her to only eat food from home. On another day, she was "greeted" by a woman displaying a black doll in a wooden coffin. Ruby's mother kept encouraging her to be strong and pray while entering the school, which Ruby discovered reduced the vehemence of the insults yelled at her and gave her courage. She spent her entire day, every day, in Mrs. Henry's classroom, not allowed to go to the cafeteria or out to recess to be with other students in the school. When she had to go to the restroom, the federal marshals walked her down the hall. Several years later, federal marshal Charles Burks, one of her escorts, commented with some pride that Ruby showed a lot of courage. She never cried or whimpered. "She just marched along like a little soldier."

http://www.biography.com/people/ruby-bridges-475426?page=2



Her courage takes my breath away.

[MannyGoldstein]

1. I met her once

Gave her a lift. Very nice woman, has a great sense of calmness about her.

[JI7]

2. this must be one of the reason the right wing is always crying about the evil Feds

has nothing to do with invading their privacy but about things like this.

[sheshe2]

3. Kick!

[struggle4progress]

4. Ruby Bridges Remembers

[struggle4progress]

5. Robert Coles on Ruby Bridges

[struggle4progress]

6. Color Barrier Breaking Student's Reunion

[sheshe2]

8. I watched them all but the last.

That will have to wait until tomorrow. Thank you, poignant, everyone. The last to made me cry.

[struggle4progress]

10. It's an incredible and touching story. Robert Coles today is at Harvard Med School,

a well-known expert on child psychology, but in that era he was a New Englander, freshly come to the South after his psychiatric residency

In his Children of Crisis, he tells of one of his early Southern experiences: bicycling beside the Gulf, he became aware of a loud dispute, "a slender, middle-aged Negro lady" screaming at "a young, athletic white man" who "had smashed her watch and stepped on her glasses." He writes that he justified his non-involvement at the time on the grounds that "it was a racial incident" and bicycled away: "I am not now very proud of those minutes. Yet if I forgot them, I would be even more ashamed." He tells how, that night, as he worked the emergency room, several local policemen he knew, who had witnessed the same incident, made segregationist small talk as he tried to busy himself with a patient

Coles had learned to work with children by having them draw crayon pictures while chatting with him, and Ruby was the first child, in the South, with whom he used the technique. Some of what what he writes, in Children of Crisis, indicates comments from the mob did affect Ruby now and then. And it's clear she made a real impression on him: he later went on to write dozens of books, including The Spiritual Life of Children and the book on Ruby read aloud in one of the videos I've posted here

[struggle4progress]

7. The Story of Ruby Bridges (children's book by Robert Coles)

[struggle4progress]

9. Ruby Bridges visits with the President and her portrait

[LiberalAndProud]

11. But was she ever on the cover of Sports Illustrated?

[WillyT]

12. Off To The Greatest Page !!!

& Rec !!!

[struggle4progress]

13. Comment on the New Orleans school segregation (John Updike | New Yorker | December 10, 1960)

Last week Rev. Lloyd Foreman & Mrs. Daisy Gabrielle were shown in the newspapers in the act of escorting their daughters to a New Orleans elementary school ... holding the hands of small white-faced little girls named Pamela & Yolanda, while behind them segregationist banshees scream obscenely & the outraged hate of millions of Southern fellow-parents focusses on them. We have become familiar with the heroism of the Negro children who each autumn carry the tide of equal right a little deeper into the South ... Together, the two schools that have been blasphemed by the presence of four small colored girls had a normal enrollment of 1000 pupils, & close to 2000 parents. Of those 2000, how many sincerely believe that racial division is divinely ordained ... One way or the other, under the pressures that a community can apply, all who hold these attitudes have been chipped away, leaving, for us to see, two --- a Christian minister, and an ex-Wac whose husband spent 3 years in a foxhole in New Guinea & wasn't going to let a mob of women tell him what to do. Out of two thousand, two ...
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1960/12/10/1960_12_10_043_TNY_CARDS_000264564

[struggle4progress]

14. Bridges' second year at William Frantz Elementary

http://64673404.nhd.weebly.com/immediate-failures-and-successes.html

[sheshe2]

21. Thank you struggle4progress

outstanding videos and links.

[struggle4progress]

22. ... I often ate in the classroom by myself while Mrs. Henry took her lunch break with other teachers

The marshals sat outside while I opened up my lunch box. As time went on I wouldn't eat. First I blamed it on the fact that my other fixed too many peanut butter sandwiches. Then I began to wish and wish that I could go the cafeteria. . . I was convinced that kids were there. I began hiding my uneaten sandwiches in a storage cabinet in the classroom. In my magical way of thinking, not eating lunch would somehow get me to the cafeteria. When roaches and mice began to appear in the room, a janitor discovered my old sandwiches. She <Mrs. Henry> was just sorry there were so many days when I hadn't eaten. After that she usually ate with me ...

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/history/spotlight_september4.html

[struggle4progress]

15. History of the Florida Neighborhood

... The Florida development was originally reserved for whites only, while Blacks were relegated to the Desire development. Unlike other low-rent public housing in New Orleans, the Florida development served what one housing official called “the lowest segment of low-income and underprivileged families.” Many of the original tenants were families from rural areas who had come to New Orleans for work but had been left stranded at the end of the war.

Two public schools had also been built by the early 1930s, William Frantz on Alvar Street for white students and Johnson Lockett on Law Street for black students. From the outset, the Florida development gained a more negative reputation than some of the other housing developments as several newspaper stories appeared documenting children who arrived to school at William Frantz hungry, inappropriately attired and with no provisions for lunch.

By 1960, the Florida area was a predominantly working class neighborhood with both white and African American residents segregated by street. During the school desegregation crisis, two Uptown schools, Lusher and Wilson, volunteered to be sites of token integration after assenting votes by their respective Parent Teacher Associations. The Orleans Parish School Board denied the requests and instead chose two schools in the Ninth Ward, William Frantz and McDonogh 19. There is evidence to suggest that the school board was aware of the implications of restricting integration to schools in lower-income neighborhoods. When Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, met with the Orleans Parish School Board prior to the decision, he specifically warned against forcing integration on poorer areas while leaving wealthier, more influential neighborhoods unaffected.

The location of the two school sites was not disclosed until November 14th, when four first graders entered the school buildings surrounded by federal marshals, three at McDonogh 19 and Ruby Bridges at William Frantz. The next day, the White Citizens’ Council held a meeting in the Municipal Auditorium attended by over 5,000 people. The leaders of the meeting called for protests and boycotts to resist integration. Leander Perez, political boss of Plaquemines Parish, was quoted as saying, “Don’t wait for your daughters to be raped by these Congolese. Do something about it now.” Perez donated money and a school building to start a private lower elementary for white students assigned to Frantz and McDonogh 19, and he used his influence to pressure St. Bernard Parish schools to accept the affected fourth, fifth, and sixth graders ...

http://rubybridgesfoundation.org/vision/history-of-the-florida-neighborhood/

[struggle4progress]

16. Ruby Bridges and Her Teacher Reunite Because of a Print-Braille Book

When my son was small, he was my best sampler of kids’ books to offer in our Children’s Braille Book Club. Book cover of "The Story of Ruby Bridges"“No, Mom. Forget it. Borrring!” was the gist of his review of many, many books. But sometimes he would surprise me, like the time he sat quietly as I read all the way through “The Story of Ruby Bridges” by Robert Coles. It was 1995, a long time after the actual story took place ...

He took the print-braille version of the book to his school in Boston. That night he mentioned, over a plate of spaghetti, “Mom, you know what? Ruby’s teacher is at my school.” I smiled. I didn’t believe him. I cleared the table.

“Really, Mom. And she wants to keep the book” ...

http://nationalbraillepress.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/ruby-bridges-and-her-teacher-reunite-because-of-a-print-braille-book/

[LiberalAndProud]

17. I imagine Mrs. Henry had a difficult time as well.

She, too, is a remarkable woman.

Q: What was the experience like working alone with Mrs. Henry?

RB: Well, this woman taught me. She read stories to me, played games with me, did art with me just filled my day with things to learn about. I remember one thing that was important to Mrs. Henry was reading. She always read stories to me. And they always took me to a different place. By second grade, I was a great reader. I discovered much later after meeting her again 35 years later that I think I picked up a lot more, from her...even my mannerisms.

Q: What did she teach you that you didn't find in your books?

RB: I learned that she was absolutely nothing like those people outside of the school. And as time went on, I learned that, even though she looked like them, she was different. And I know now that it was because of her heart. I learned that there was no way to judge her the same way as I would judge the people outside of the school simply because she looked like them. So what I took away from that experience is that there's no way you can judge a person before you get to know them. Which is what I say to kids. It's the lesson that Dr. King tried to teach us: that we should never judge a person by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/courage-learn

[struggle4progress]

18. ... Born Barbara Gould in 1932, she graduated from the public Girls' Latin School. After earning

a B.A. from Newton College of the Sacred Heart, and graduate studies in history and government at Boston College, she taught children of U.S. Air Force personnel in Europe from 1958-60. It was during this time that she met and fell in love with an Air Force officer named Elmer Henry. They were married in 1960, relocating in September of that year to her husband's home city of New Orleans.

Mrs. Henry applied for a position in the city's public school system, which was about to undergo court-ordered desegregation. She soon received a call from the superintendent who asked if she would mind teaching an integrated class. "Of course not," she replied, and was then hired and assigned to the William Frantz School. On November 14, 1960, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, the first black child to attend the Frantz School, arrived escorted by federal marshals. Most white parents had withdrawn their children, leaving Ruby as the sole pupil in Mrs. Henry's classroom ...

Towards the end of the school year a few white children were allowed to come into the classroom for part of the day. When Ruby began second grade the following September, the protestors had disappeared and she was in a regular classroom that included several other African American children. She was dismayed, however, to find that Mrs. Henry was no longer at the school. That summer, expecting their first child, the Henrys had moved to Boston. Their son Charles was born there, to be followed by Christopher and Courtney. Barbara Henry returned to teaching during the mid-1960s ...

We'll Never Turn Back: Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Featured Speakers

[struggle4progress]

19. WSB-TV newsfilm clip of the William Frantz and McDonogh elementary schools ...

In this WSB newsfilm clip from December 1960, white demonstrators protest the court-ordered integration of William Frantz Public School, white parents ignore a boycott and take their daughters to school, and other white parents organize an alternative, segregated school for students from Frantz and McDonogh 19 schools in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The clip begins with white demonstrators standing outside of the William Frantz public school protesting its November 14 integration. The men and women are dressed in warm clothes; many wear hats, scarves, and heavy jackets. A white woman and her daughter, Daisy and Yolanda Gabrielle, walk up the sidewalk towards Frantz school. Next, two men are seen walking with a child between them. The men are Methodist minister Lloyd A. Foreman, who is taking his daughter Pamela Lynn to school, and Catholic priest Jerome A. Drolet. After the November 14 integration of William Frantz and McDonogh 19 schools, the local White Citizens Council organized a boycott of the schools. Most parents took their children out of the schools and either organized private schools or did not send their children to school that year. Two families, the Gabrielles and the Foremans, ignored the boycott and continued to walk through crowds of shouting demonstrators to take their daughters to school. Community pressure caused both families to leave New Orleans by December 14 ...

http://crdl.usg.edu/export/html/ugabma/wsbn/crdl_ugabma_wsbn_42576.html

emphasis added

[Liberal_in_LA]

20. k&r