Bridges, the first black student to integrate William Frantz Public school in New Orleans, is best known as the little girl who inspired the famous Norman Rockwell painting, “The Problem We All Live With.” The painting is on display through Feb. 5 at the Dayton museum as part of “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell” exhibit.
After showing film clips and photos of the historic day in 1960, Bridges related the experience as she remembered it from her childhood. She said U.S. Federal Marshals knocked on her door and announced they had been sent by the president to escort her to school. Her excited neighbors followed the car all the way.
“That’s community and that’s what’s missing in so many communities across the country today,” she said. “We need to care about each other.”
Bridges, who was told nothing about what was actually taking place that day, said she was excited to be going to a new school and assumed it was Mardi Gras when she saw bystanders shouting and throwing things. Because she had passed a test to be accepted at the school, she concluded she was going from first grade right to college.
When school was dismissed after a short time in the principal’s office that first day, Bridges concluded “college is easy!”
For a year, she and her teacher were the only people in the first grade classroom. Ruby was not permitted to eat in the cafeteria with the handful of white students whose parents had crossed the picket lines; her parents were told there had been threats of poisoning. She was escorted to and from the rest room by the federal marshals. The greatest challenge, she said, was loneliness.
Her mother, she said, had to sit and pray every day that her child would come home at three o’clock.
Ruby’s first grade teacher, she said, was kind and soon became her best friend.
“She did everything all day to help me forget what was going on outside,” Bridges said. “We played games, had stories and music and art. I knew everyday I was going to learn something new and it was because of her.” The two were reunited on the Opray Winfrey Show after 35 years.
Near the end of her presentation, Bridges told the crowd that one of her four sons had been murdered “by someone who looked exactly like him.”
Her point, she said, is that people should never be judged by the color of their skin, where they live, what they have. Good and evil, she said, come in all shades and colors.
“We do our children a disservice,” she concluded, “if we teach them only to be friends with people of their same kind.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2440 or MMoss@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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