Ruby Bridges, the first African-American to attend a white elementary school in the deep South, 1960

On the civil rights road, children also became public figures, such as six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Ruby was born in Abon, in Tylerstown, Mississippi. and Lucille Bridges.

When she was 4 years old, her parents, Ebon and Lucille Bridges, moved to New Orleans, hoping for a better life in a bigger city. Her father got a job as a gas station attendant and her mother took night jobs to help support her growing family.

The fact that Ruby Bridges was born in the same year that the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education separated schools is a notable coincidence in her early foray into civil rights activism.

When Ruby was in kindergarten, she was one of several African-American students in New Orleans who were selected to take a test to determine whether she could attend a white school. It is said that the exam was written particularly difficult so that the students had difficulty in passing.

The idea was that if all African-American children failed the test, New Orleans schools could remain isolated for a period of time.

Ruby lived only five blocks from a white school, but attended kindergarten at a different black school several miles away. Bridges was one of six black children in New Orleans to pass this test.

On the morning of November 14, 1960, federal marshals escorted Ruby and her mother five blocks to her new school. While in the car, one of the men explained that when they got to school, two marshals would walk in front of Ruby, and two would follow her.

The image of this little black girl being taken to school by four older white men inspired Norman Rockwell to create the painting "The Problem We All Must Live With", which graced the cover of Look magazine in 1964.

White parents dragged their own children out as soon as Bridges entered school; All the teachers refused to teach when a black child was enrolled. The only person who agreed to teach Ruby was Barbara Henry from Boston, Massachusetts, and for over a year Henry taught her alone, "as if she were teaching the whole class".

On that first day, Bridges and her adult companions spent the entire day in the principal's office; School chaos prevented him from attending class until the second day.

The other day, however, a white student broke the boycott and entered the school, when a 34-year-old Methodist minister, Lloyd Anderson Foreman, led his 5-year-old daughter Pam through an angry crowd, saying, "I'm just my Wishing you the good fortune of taking the child to school…”

A few days later, other white parents began to bring their children and the protests began to subside. Every morning, as Bridges went to school, a woman threatened to poison him; Because of this, the US marshal sent by President Eisenhower, who was overseeing her security, allowed Ruby to eat only what she brought from home.

The Bridges family suffered for their decision to send her to William Frantz Elementary: her father lost his job, the grocery store the family shopped at would no longer let them shop there, and his grandparents , who was a sharecropper in Mississippi, was laid off. land. She noted that many others in the community, both black and white, showed support in various ways.

Some white families continued to send their children to Frantz despite protests, a neighbor offered his father a new job, and locals looked after the children, viewed the home as a protector, and federalized on school trips. behind Marshall's car.

Ruby graduated from a different high school, became a travel agent, married, and had four sons. She reunited with her first teacher, Henry, in the mid-1990s, and the pair chatted together for some time.

Ruby later wrote about her early experiences in two books, and Carter G. Woodson Book Award. A lifelong activist for racial equality, Ruby founded the Ruby Bridges Foundation in 1999 to promote tolerance and drive change through education. In 2000, he was transferred to Washington, D.C. was made an honorary deputy marshal in a ceremony in