The Sixties: Rosa Parks and her effect on Ruby Bridges - (prequel)

No history of the 1960s is complete without examining Rosa Parks and her incredible role in the birth of the civil rights movement.

(This is the beginning of a series on The Sixties I wrote in 2006. This is the 'prequel', as it deals with Rosa Parks. The others in the series I will repost, beginning in January.)

In 1955, Rosa Parks was in her 40s and worked as a seamstress in a department store in Montgomery, Alabama. One night, feeling emboldened by her membership in the growing NAACP movement, she sat in the front of the bus, staunchly refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man, in violence of the local laws that segregated whites and blacks.

Parks was arrested and convicted of violating segregation laws, and fined $10.

Parks' actions resounded throughout the US for many years to come. Immediately after her arrest, local Blacks boycotted Mongomery buses for 13 months, thus creating a successful challenge to the old Jim Crow law, which had enforced a second-class status on Blacks within the public bus system.

By 1956, merely one year after Parks' action and the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, the U.S. Supremem Court ruled that public bus transportation be desgregated.

This U.S. Supreme Court ruling was the first of its kind, and the first step toward what would eventually end segregation nationwide.

The famous photo of Rosa Parks that we've all seen (in which she is pictured sitting in the front of a bus) is one that was taken after the 1956 U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordered desegregation.

The photo appeared in the Mongomery Advertiser and is still under copyright protection.

Desgregation of public transportation was a huge step for the burgeoning civil rights movement, a step that was hard-won with great pride.

It was Parks' arrest, in fact, that partly spurred then 26-year-old preacher Martin Luther King to action, giving birth to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Much of what we know of as civil rights legislation today we owe to the brave efforts of Parks and King, of this era. Parks died in 2005, but her legacy lives on.

Only four years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a small girl named Ruby Bridges, became one of four black girls who would become known as the first black girls to attend white schools in New Orleans.

In September, 1960, with echoes of Rosa Parks resounding, Ruby Bridges entered first grade as the first black pupil at the William Frantz Elementary School.

"The Problem We All Live With" by Norman Rockwell, courtesy of Wikipedia.

In violation of the federal desgegration law, New Orleans schools were segregated, and a federal judge ordered four black girls to attend white schools in New Orleans. Ruby went to the Frantz school, the other three girls went to another New Orleans school.

Ruby was all of six years old. White parents were angry and stood outside the door of the school as Ruby entered the schoolhouse.

Ruby's mother had warned Ruby to behave herself at school. But Ruby was not the problem. The problem was with all the parents who stood outside, heckling and jeering Ruby, calling her names and ugly words.

For Ruby's protection, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered U.S. Federal Marshals to accompany Ruby into the school building. Every day, Federal Marshals led the way for Ruby's entrance; every day angry white parents jeered Ruby as she entered the school.

White parents pulled their children from the Frantz school and Ruby was alone in the classroom. Ruby's teacher, Miss Hurley, was alone with Ruby. Ruby was a bright girl and a diligent student.

One day, Ruby stopped in front of the angry crowd.

She prayed for the crowd. This was what Ruby prayed, as she spoke to the angry crowd:

"Please, God, try to forgive those people.
Because even if they say those bad things,
They don't know what they're doing.
So You could forgive them,
Just like You did those folks a long time ago
When they said terrible things about You."

After that day, she repeated the prayer before and after school.

Later that year in 1960, two white boys joined Ruby at the Frantz elementary school, bringing the number of students enrolled to three.

Soon, other children joined those two boys. Ruby had won.

The next year, Ruby was in second grade, and the angry mob stopped coming to the school.

Ruby graduated from the Frantz elementary school, and continued to junior high and high school.

She is married to a building contractor and has four sons, who all attended New Orleans Public Schools.

Ruby Bridges Hall created the Ruby Bridges Educational Foundation, to increase parental involvement in schools.

Ruby's bravery inspired the 1966 Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With, a beautiful painting linked.

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For more information, write: The Ruby Bridges Educational Foundation, P.O. Box 870248, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70187.

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Books for children:

"Rosa Parks: My Story" by Rosa Parks, with Jim Haskins, Puffin Books, New York, 1999.

"The Story of Ruby Bridges" by Robert Coles, Illustrated by George Ford, Scholastic Books, New York.

Copyright  © 2007 - 2008 Kathryn Esplin-Oleski