Lucille Bridges, who stood by daughter Ruby through school desegregation, dies at 86

[demmiblue]

“Now, Ruby,” Lucille Bridges told her daughter on Nov. 14, 1960, “you’re going to a new school today, and you better behave.”

On that day, flanked by U.S. Marshals, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges reported for first grade at William Frantz Public School in New Orleans, becoming one of the first African American pupils to integrate an elementary school in the South.

Bedecked in a bow, and looking ever so petite next to the armed escorts who towered over her, she inspired Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With,” a celebrated image of the civil rights movement published in Look magazine in 1964.

Ruby did not know what to make of the noisy crowd gathered outside the school building and surmised that perhaps she had happened upon a Mardi Gras celebration, she told the Dallas Morning News years later. The onlookers, many of them parents of White students at the school, jeered at her. “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate,” they chanted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lucille-bridges-who-stood-by-daughter-ruby-through-school-desegregation-dies-at-86/2020/11/11/ab37a36e-241d-11eb-952e-0c475972cfc0_story.html

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Rest in peace, Mrs. Bridges.

[Spazito]

2. Her courage in sending her daughter into that maelstrom ....

knowing how important and how potentially dangerous it was for her child, I don't know if I would have been that courageous and wise under the same circumstances.

RIP Lucille Bridges, your courage helped change so much.

[crickets]

3. We are all so fortunate that Lucille Bridges, her daughter Ruby, and Barbara Henry persevered.

The strength of these three women helped us become a better country.

[Boogiemack]

4. Rest in Power. nt