50 Years Later, Ruby Bridges Still Fights for Equality

(Nov. 14) -- When Ruby Bridges arrived for her first day at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans 50 years ago, she thought it was Mardi Gras. People lined the streets, shouting and throwing things -- just like a Carnival parade. But these people weren't celebrating.

At 6 years old, Bridges had been unwittingly thrust onto the grand stage of American history. Her parents had volunteered her to be the first black child to attend an all-white school in the South. Local law enforcement refused to protect her from the unruly mobs that surrounded her school, so every day she was escorted by four federal marshals -- the scene immortalized by Norman Rockwell's painting "The Problem We All Live With."

That first day, all the parents had rushed into the building and taken their kids out -- effectively boycotting the school. The school didn't quite know what to do; Ruby was told to just sit in the principal's office until it was time to go home.

"I remember thinking, 'This school is easy,'" Bridges told AOL News.

Since then, Bridges grew up, raised four sons and worked as a travel agent before returning to a career as an educational activist that she had started at such a young age. But while her educational career eventually subsided into a normal New Orleans childhood -- albeit one charged by forced integration -- those exceptional first days in school had shaped her for life.

Ruby didn't meet the person who would make the biggest impact on her until her second day of school. Walking down those long, empty hallways with federal marshals at her side was an intimidating experience. But when she finally got to her classroom, that disappeared in an instant. She found Barbara Henry, a young teacher who had come down from Boston to teach Ruby. Local teachers refused to do it.

"Before that day, being black, I was only accustomed to seeing black teachers -- not to mention that she looked exactly like all of the people outside who were screaming and yelling outside," Bridges says. "But soon after, she began to teach me, and I realized she was one of the nicest teachers I had ever had. She showed me her heart, and she was totally different from the people that were outside, angry and screaming.

"You can't just look at a person and judge them -- and I think that is the most valuable lesson that I took away from that experience in first grade," Bridges said.

The forced integration that began with Bridges was based on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, where the justices reversed the earlier ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson and said that "separate but equal" facilities were inherently inequitable and unconstitutional.

Fifty years later, however, race remains an important factor in predicting a child's educational success, and some argue that schools in many parts of the country remain effectively segregated by race and class. Earlier in the week, AOL News' Mara Gay wrote about the latest in a long series of studies examining the deep achievement gap between white and black males. Educators say that the poor schools in predominantly black neighborhoods are to blame.

It's that continuing inequity that spurred Bridges to pursue educational activism. She travels around the country giving talks at schools and now, as her hometown of New Orleans tries to build an education system better than the one it lost after Hurricane Katrina, she's turning her attention local.

The school that Bridges desegregated so many years ago has since fallen into disrepair, but she wants to reopen it with a focus on teaching social justice and history, and to open a civil rights museum next door. In a city where many of the schools once again have racially homogeneous student bodies, she wants to put a special emphasis on diversity.

Bridges lost a son to the violence that plagues much of New Orleans, and for her, breaking that cycle of violence starts in the city's schools.

"I really believe that education is the key -- it was the key out of slavery, and I feel like it is the key today," she said. "I'm hoping that someone will sit up and take notice and understand that it's not just about building another school and throwing bodies in it."

Bridges remembers her early years in increasingly integrated classes as uneventful; kids don't really care what color their friend's skin is, she says. But as she got older, the entrenched racial tensions of the time came to bear, and the enmity between black and white students grew every year.

She wants to give today's children a chance to start differently.

"If we create an environment where kids can work together and play together, that's the best thing for all of us, because we need each other -- we need each other to stand up against what's out there in the world."