What must it be like to have become an American icon at age six? How does the same person experience life now, more than 40 years later?

From the viewpoint of middle age, as a woman with four children of her own, Ruby Bridges Hall speaks eloquently about both the events that made her famous and her current career. In a talk given at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, to a large audience of adults, college students, and children, this quietly dynamic African American woman brought back an era in American history full of drama and consequence.

It was November 14, 1960 when Ruby Bridges and her mother were escorted by federal marshals through a hateful jeering crowd into the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. The artist Norman Rockwell later memorialized the scene by showing the little girl dressed in white and preceded by her looming guards against the background of a stone wall defaced with racist graffiti.

Ruby’s parents were sharecroppers who had not gone past the sixth grade but they had the courage to sign up their child for the first step in school integration. “Oh my God, what have I done?” Ruby recalls her mother crying out when she realized that the whole world was watching.

“We want you to walk straight ahead and not look back,” the marshals told Ruby and her mother. The child concentrated on what her parents had emphasized – – behaving. The street scene was inevitably confusing to her “I knew absolutely nothing else of what was going on,” she says. But she remembers one of the crowd’s chants: “Two, four, six, eight, –  – we don’t want to integrate.” Later that afternoon she went home and jumped rope to this refrain.

Inside the school building Ruby found herself the only child there. No white family would allow their kids to enter. But a white teacher took Ruby “into both her classroom and her heart.” Mrs. Henry had come from Boston and became, in Ruby’s words, “the nicest teacher I ever had.”

Still, she could not get used to being the alone in that school. “I spent the whole time searching for the kids,” she tells her audience. She remembers going into the cafeteria and seeing it empty. For a long time, she thought it was all a dream.

But she confesses now hating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the lunch that her mother used to make for her to make sure she was not poisoned. This distaste serves as a reminder of what she went through. And she remembers the threatening atmosphere: “Outside the school, there were always people threatening to harm me.”

During the rest of her childhood and adolescence Ruby did not think much about the meaning of her menacing experience. Only when she reached age 19, and looked at Rockwell’s portrayal of the events did she come to see their meaning. Then she began to ask herself the question, “How can we still be dealing with the same problem?”

Since becoming adult, this eloquent woman has devoted herself to the struggle against prejudice based on race. She traces the beginnings of this vocation to religious inspiration: “I went into my prayer closet and asked ‘Lord, show me,’” she told a questioner. “I honestly believe I’m being led by faith,” she stated.

She focuses her educational efforts on children because they offer the hope of a future free of racism. “I never judge anyone by the color of their skin,” Ruby says, and that is her ideal for others. “I learned the lesson of Dr. King at age 6,” that you should judge as person only by their character.

When she looks at infants, Ruby Bridges Hall sees human beings born with a clean heart and a fresh start. Later on, however, the “begin to think they are better than someone else.” And they learn this way of thinking from us adults.

She raises this perception to a theological insight. “Every child comes with a message, that God is not yet discouraged with humanity.” That is a reason why she does not get discouraged by the obstacles that make changing people so difficult. “It has to come from within,” she observes of the rejection of racism.

Ruby is a woman filled with memories of the past, memories at once rich and distressing. She played a part, small but also momentous, the agonizing history of the struggle for civil rights in America. Inevitably, that history will take on different shades of meaning the further she becomes removed from it in time. What she hopes, a hope that will be shared by all people of good will, is that, by the time she reaches old age, her country will have rejected more definitively racism in all of its forms.

Richard Griffin