Ruby Bridges is 72 now, but she vividly remembers being a 6-year-old girl walking into an all-white school for the first time in November 1960. She was surrounded by federal marshals who escorted her past crowds of angry white people.
She told a sold-out crowd at Booker High on Thursday night about her innocence at that time, and how her sharecropper parents really didn’t explain the magnitude of what she was doing simply by going to school.
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“That was the best approach ever,” Bridges said. “In hindsight it would have been much worse if they’d tried to explain it."
Instead, the little girl from New Orleans imagined all the people shouting and throwing things must be celebrating Mardi Gras. She didn’t understand the hateful words on their signs, and their cries of “two-four-six-eight, we don’t want to integrate” became the chant she and her sister jumped rope to later, at home.
Bridges scored well on a test to get into the school, so she also imagined she must have skipped a bunch of grades, and this must be what college was like.
Having attended an all African-American school in kindergarten, her entry to William Frantz Elementary School also marked the first time she ever encountered a white person, one-on-one. That was her teacher, Mrs. Barbara Henry.
“She looked like all the people with the angry faces outside,” Bridges recalled. But soon, she realized her teacher was loving and kind, and would become her “best friend.”
On Thursday, Bridges also gave a talk at Bay Haven Elementary, the first school in Sarasota County to be integrated in 1962 when 29 Black students enrolled.
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“I always had a fixation on what Ruby went through, because when we did desegregation here in Sarasota, it didn't look like what happened to Ruby,” said Walter Gilbert, former head of the NAACP in Sarasota.
Gilbert’s great-granddaughter dressed up as Ruby Bridges during Black History Month as part of a class led by Bay Haven teacher Teidra Everett, who re-enacts historic figures throughout February every year.
“It was so moving,” Gilbert said after Thursday’s visit. “Those kids hung on every word.”
Local leaders, school board members and parents came to the Bay Haven event, where they marched together to reenact the support Bridges experienced as a child, when Black parents would walk behind her on the way to school.
“She told the children not to be afraid, to step out and do what they feel is right," said Dr. Washington Hill, chair of the Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition.
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“Children know what's right, and when they see something that's not right, they speak up. And she encouraged them to continue to speak up, regardless of how old you are, regardless of what the issue is.”
Bridges said she gives talks at schools around the US and internationally.
One visitor at Booker High, Alexander Kupfer, came from Germany for the chance to meet Bridges. He submitted a piece of artwork to the nonprofit Embracing Our Differences in her honor.
His picture, “Colors Matter,” shows a little mouse in bright colors, walking with her head held high, between three gray FBI agents, also mice.
“But one of them, in fact, is turning his head back to the little girl," Kupfer said. "So there's some kind of a relation, and the message is that things might change if you're brave enough to make your point."
