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Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges to speak at UW Tacoma

May 9, 2011

Ruby Bridges, who received the Presidential Citizen's Medal in 2001, the highest U.S. civilian honor alongside the Congressional Medal of Honor, will address a sold-out audience.

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Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges will share her remarkable story about integrating an all-white school in 1960 at the age of 6 with a sold-out crowd at UW Tacoma, May 21.

Her story inspired Norman Rockwell to paint a well-known portrait of her being walked to school by U.S. deputy marshals, The Problem We All Live With.

The event is sponsored by the Tacoma Art Museum, which currently features an exhibit of Rockwell's work.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled an end to "separate but equal" schools in the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case, but most Southern schools remained segregated. By court order, New Orleans was forced to enroll black children in the all-white schools by gradually segregating, beginning in first grade. An entrance test was given to kindergarteners to see who would be selected to integrate first grade. Six children passed, but Ruby Bridges was the only one who enrolled.

U.S. marshals escorted 6-year-old Bridges through crowds of angry whites outside the school house doors. She later said she thought it was Mardi Gras, because there were so many people and they were throwing things and shouting.

Inside, she remained segregated, taught in a classroom by herself, while droves of white parents pulled their children from the school and teachers refused to work while there was a black child in the school. Riots broke out around the city. Her father lost his job and her grandparents were evicted from their sharecropper farm.

But some people, white and black, supported the Bridges family, and the angry crowds eventually departed. By second grade, several black children were enrolled in the school and the white children came back.

Now Ruby Bridges Hall lives in New Orleans. She formed the Ruby Bridges Foundation in 1999 to promote tolerance and the same year wrote a book, Through My Eyes, about her experience.

In 2001, she was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Learn more about Ruby Bridges at www.rubybridges.com

Written by Beth Luce
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