Ruby Bridges says she told a little lie en route to her TODAY appearance earlier this year.
“On the plane, everybody’s standing up, got their bag and this lady says, ‘Are you Ruby Bridges?’ And I looked at her and I said, ‘No,’” she recalled.
Through a fit of laughter, Bridges said, “And then she said, ‘Oh, because you look so much like her.’ I felt so bad when I walked out of the plane. But I was like, I am not opening up this, not right here.”
“It just wasn’t the time and place,” she said. “That was going to open the door for more questions.”
That may not have been the moment for Bridges to speak about her legacy — but her sit-down interview is.
Bridges’ legacy as a civil rights activist began when she was 6 years old and helped desegregate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. Bridges, escorted by federal marshals and her mother, passed picket lines as she walked into the building each day. Blocks away, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost desegregated the nearby McDonogh 19 Elementary School and passed similar crowds of protestors. In doing so, they were an instrumental part of integrating the school system at large, and creating an example for the rest of the country.
Their enrollment took place six years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, which found that segregating public school children based on their race was unconstitutional. The decisive strikedown of “separate but equal” schooling occurred months before Bridges was born.
In the six decades since, students across the country have written letters to Bridges. She’s compiled some of the letters, and her responses, in her new book, “Dear Ruby: Hear Our Hearts.” She is also author of several other books that tell her story.
Part of her lingering trauma, Bridges…
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