It was perhaps the most famous walk to school a 6-year-old ever took.
On Nov. 14, 1960, federal marshals escorted Ruby Bridges past angry, threatening crowds and up the steps of the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, CNN recounted.
Bridges was one of the first Black students to integrate public schools after the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Her first day happened after Black parents filed a lawsuit against the New Orleans school board for not desegregating. Bridges’ mother, Lucille Bridges, died Tuesday
As Bridges entered the school that day, protestors shouted at her tiny frame, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate,” along with angry, racist slurs.
But the child at first associated the shouting with celebrations like Mardi Gras, and didn’t realize at the time they were shouting at her, she told a Zoom session hosted by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which has a replica of her classroom in its “Power of Children” exhibit, on Wednesday, USA Today reported.
Her naïveté wore down as the crowds returned for months, sometimes carrying a tiny coffin with a Black doll inside. She had to be escorted by the marshals for six months, and over that time, the attacks gave her nightmares, she said.
Bridges said she didn’t realize the role she played in history until she was older, and she saw Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With.” The iconic painting shows the little girl being escorted by federal marshals while walking past the “N” word graffitied on a wall. Her silhouette from that painting got new attention last week, when a tribute to Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris created by a San Francisco artist went viral. The work showed Harris walking alongside Bridges’ shadow.
