Reclaimed from Blogjob, because of yesterday's news flap...Blogjob demanded a picture. The picture was an Amazon Associate book link. Amazon no longer Associates with this web site because the association wasn't earning enough money fast enough. But now Google is trying to insert a "missing picture" box. Can we feed Google a new picture? Why not? Fair Use...
Title: Through My Eyes
Date: 1999
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Length: 64 pages
Illustrations: many photos
Quote: “History pushed in and swept me up in a whirlwind.”
At the end of the spring school term in 1960, a small select group of African-American students in New Orleans kindergartens were given special tests. The students had not been prepared to pass the tests. Most apparently didn’t. The Bridges family, however, received follow-up contact from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, urging the parents to send little Ruby to the formerly all-White William Frantz Public School. “They said it was a better school and closer to my home...They said I had the right to go to the closest school in my district. They pressured my parents and made a lot of promises.”
Nevertheless, Ruby started the next school year at a formerly all-Black school. Only in mid-November was she escorted into the William Frantz school building by four federal marshals. She was not admitted to an actual class. She and her mother spent the first day in the principal’s office, watching other children’s parents as “they ran into classrooms and dragged their children out of the school.” At least, little Ruby thought, her new school was easy. When she left the building, again chauffeured by marshals to her home where “police had set up barricades at each end of the block,” she finally recognized how much hate she had been set up against: “seeing a [B]lack doll in a coffin...frightened me more than anything else.”
On the second day, a Northern-born teacher was appointed to tutor Ruby Bridges, and the two spent the whole day in an otherwise empty classroom. “I wasn’t allowed to have lunch in the cafeteria or go outside for recess,” Bridges recalls. “If I had to go to the bathroom, the marshals walked me down the hall.”
Outside, protesters were picketing the school. The hate was not really aimed at a little girl who had been chosen for her role in history partly because she looked helpless and harmless, “the littlest...girl you ever saw.” The women who “came to scream at” Ruby Bridges also screamed “at the few White children who crossed the picket lines and went to school,” and their foul language shocked even the earthy novelist John Steinbeck, who would later be scolded for recording some of the ugliness in a book
. For the whole first term, while seventeen White children were also dodging eggs and rocks as they entered and left the building, little Ruby was so thoroughly segregated from what should have been her classmates that she didn’t even realize they were there.The men who hated enforced integration turned their hate on adults. Crosses were burned. A voodoo doll was made to represent Judge Skelly Wright, who had ordered the integration of William Frantz Public School. Abon Bridges, Ruby’s father, was dismissed from his job; rather than extending credit to the now wageless Bridges family, their neighbors banned them from the corner store.
By the next year, when the sky hadn’t fallen, the protesters resigned themselves to their defeat. Ruby Bridges spent grade two in a regular classroom, with a local teacher who scolded her for having picked up traces of her first grade teacher’s Northern accent. She stayed in New Orleans. Eventually she used her fame to set up a foundation to benefit inner city schools, including Frantz. She admits that “I was tempted to feel bitter about the school integration experience, not understanding why I had to go through it...alone. Now I know it was meant to be that way.”
I’m glad she used the phrase “was meant to,” rather than, say, “had to.” Why was so much hate aimed at little children? Historically, the desegregation of the New Orleans school system was yet another episode in American history where the democratic alternative was ignored in a conflict between two dictatorial approaches to a problem. Segregationists were demanding that Big Government subsidize segregated schools; integrationists were demanding that Big Government force people to change a system that, despite its obvious disadvantages for all concerned, had at least been their own. Along with dozens of other children who lacked her poster-child look, Ruby Bridges was caught in the crossfire between the two totalitarian camps. Virtually no attention was given to the fact that school desegregation had been begun by private individuals approximately 120 years before the federal government was allowed to step in—and in Kentucky it had worked remarkably well.
In the pre-television era when Americans still valued modesty, Berea College hadn’t even been the only school where students and teachers agreed to try racial integration. Berea was the only college that made desegregation a requirement. Dozens if not hundreds of schools had been racially integrated before totalitarian segregation policies had been marketed as a Southern Thing. School segregation had been burdensome enough in states, such as Virginia, that simply redefined every citizen as either Black or White and thereby ruled other ethnic groups nonexistent. In a state like Delaware, which had recognized the right of five distinct racial groups to segregate themselves from one another, enforcing segregation was so blatantly ridiculous that in hindsight one has to wonder whether the intention was for the state to avoid having to maintain any public schools at all. Hundreds if not thousands of schools reintegrated themselves in 1954, when the Supreme Court lifted what had become the requirement that cities and counties maintain two or more separate buildings where one would have been more cost-effective.
It’s good to read that, as a middle-aged woman, Ms. Bridges has been able to integrate her appalling childhood experience into a life dedicated to helping others...but her experience was so unnecessary. If government had consistently backed the alternative of school choice, children like Ruby Bridges and her White counterpart, Yolanda Gabrielle, could have gone to schools that had never been segregated. Both children were bright enough, and well enough brought up, to have succeeded in a system that distracted attention from racial differences toward achievement.
Is it possible that watching a movie version of this book might incite second grade students to reenact the emotion-stirring, "exciting" scenes from the color war? Yes. Is it possible that teachers should be asked to read the book, and watch carefully for unwanted effects on individual children, instead of showing whole classrooms the movie? Yes. My husband shared this book with dozens of students in grades four through six, and the only problems were the problems with reading that got those students into his after-school classes. Larger groups, in lower grades, might have worse problems. I shared this book with Adult Education students from ghetto schools, and sold leftover copies to conservative White Southern Baptists, and know the book does not inflame hate. But it may need more careful teaching to children who feel angry and frustrated about being forced into crowded school environments. I certainly would not trust the people currently ruining Disney's corporate name to do that.
I think this is a very good first book about racism, and at some point before "graduating" from grade six students should have read and discussed it. (The discussion should, of course, point to anyone who starts screaming "Racism equals fascism equals conservative equals Southern" as an example of the kind of bigotry Ruby Bridges was forced to confront, and highlight her awareness of exactly how politics was being used to turn fear into hate. And adults should always remember how, from Sleeping Beauty on, the printed story or book has always been much better than the Disney movie.) Adults should read it themselves and share it with their children and grandchildren. It's a good enough book to be presented to children that way, rather than forced on them at school.
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