November will be the anniversary of what should have been a very normal walk to school for a very normal little girl.

  

But it was anything but 'normal' in that place and time.

November of 2020 will be the anniversary of the day 60 years ago that Ruby Bridges walked into an elementary school classroom of an all white school in New Orleans.  The first African-American child to attend a white elementary school in the south.  She was one of several children given the opportunity and a test was devised, deliberately difficult, to decide if the children would qualify.  Ruby was one of six children to pass the test but, the only one to enroll in the school.  

 I wonder what her mother prayed over her child when she tucked her in, the night before the testing?  Testing that would insure few, if any would qualify.  I imagine her mother's elation at her daughter's good scores must have been tempered by the dread of knowing what might lay ahead for their family.

Recently, Ruby said that, at the time, she was not really aware of the impact of that first day at William Frantz School.  That she was just a little girl going to school and
innocent of the full weightof that simple activity.
By the end of that year, she knew.  But not that day.  Not fully.

Ruby's mother would not have had the luxury of that innocence.   She had been raised in the south and denied education.  She knew the way of the world at that time.  She understood the risk.  I cant imagine how her heart must have felt, as a mother, to expose her oldest child to such public hate.

Every time I see this black and white picture of little Ruby, flanked by U.S. Marshals, walking to school, I think of her mother, who sent her beautiful child out among those who would speak ugliness to her with angry faces, twisted by hate.

When I look at those tiny feet in little black Mary Jane shoes, the dress ironed, crisp and full, the white sweater that looks brand new and fresh, I see a mother who has given her daughter the tools to present herself confident and capable. 

I cannot fathom the kind of courage it would have taken.  The depth of faith.  To count the cost and determine to have more for her child than she herself had.

And the cost was steep.

Ruby's father lost his job over their family's involvement in integration.  Her mother was turned away from the grocery store she frequented and her grandparents were evicted from the farm they had lived on for 25 years. The family had bricks thrown at their house, threatening letters and phone calls.

Ruby had perfect attendance that year despite walking through shouts and name calling on the way to school every day.

And I go back to that image of the little girl with the starched dress.  From her toes to the bow in her hair, her mother clothed her in  HOPE.

A conversation with Ruby Bridges