Through My Eyes

A few times towards the end of the school year, Bridges met some white classmates. She did face racist confrontations from at least one child who told her he could not play with her because she was Black, and this episode helped her to understand racism. She also says, however, that she was not mad at the boy because he was merely obeying his mother’s orders, just as she would (50).

An excerpt written by Mrs. Henry reveals the back end of Bridges getting to meet other children. Mrs. Henry was unaware that there were white first-graders attending school until the spring and demanded to the principal that Bridges be able to learn alongside the other children once she realized Bridges was isolated. The other first grade teacher would not allow Bridges to come to her classroom, but the white children came into Mrs. Henry’s classroom for some time each day. This was the first classroom-level integration at William Frantz Public School.

Second grade was very different for Bridges than first grade was in significant ways. Marshals did not drive Bridges to school. There were no protestors lining the walkway to the building. There were other Black children in her class, as well as many white students. Bridges says she was very upset her first day of second grade, because she assumed Mrs. Henry would still be her teacher. Mrs. Henry, it turns out, was not invited back to teach at William Frantz and moved back to Boston with her husband.

Even with classmates and without the burden of being the only Black student at the school, the changes to her routine upset Bridges. She also says that no one mentioned what happened the year before and that “it was as though it had never happened” (52). No one spoke to Bridges about the changes that occurred, and she did not like her new teacher. She was singled out for the Boston accent she picked up from Mrs. Henry and “felt different from the other kids in [her] class, and it wasn’t just because of [her] accent” (53). Other people could not relate to what she had been through or understand how it had changed her.

Instead of narration, a chronological list of major events of the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement is provided. The list starts with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in May 1954 and ends with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968. November 1960 marks the first-grade integration of the New Orleans schools. Other items on the list pertain to education as well, such as September 1962, when James Meredith became the first Black person to attend the University of Mississippi.

The list also includes Rosa Parks’s refusal to forfeit her seat on a city bus, the Freedom Rides to further challenge segregation on public transportation in 1961, and Thurgood Marshall’s historic appointment to the Supreme Court.

Chapter 23 is the longest in the book as Bridges walks the reader through the broad strokes of her life post-1961. After elementary school, she attended an integrated high school and the book contains a photograph from high school graduation. She worked as a travel agent for many years after that.

She discusses her family, which struggled in several ways after the stress of what they experienced together during Bridges’s first grade school year. Bridges’s parents separated, and she suspects that their disagreement over whether their daughter should have integrated William Frantz was a contributing factor. Her father died when she was 24. She also discloses that her brother died in “a drug-related shooting” in the 1990s (57). His death “woke [her] up in a way” (57) and helped her to realize the larger importance of the freedom struggle Black Americans continue to undertake. His death motivated her to once again be active in bringing about change for her community. She launched the Ruby Bridges Foundation in 1999 to bring afterschool programs to William Frantz Public School, which had, since the 1960s, become an underserved majority-Black elementary school. The foundation does similar work at other inner-city schools in need.