“I honestly believe I’m being led by faith,” says Ruby Bridges Hall of her current work. As an adult she travels around the country teaching children and others about the evils of racial prejudice.
She discovered her vocation through prayer. “I went into my prayer closet and asked the Lord, ‘Show me,’ and then things started to fall in place,” she explained to a large crowd of adults, college students, and children gathered one evening last week in the Harvard University Church.
This is the same person who, as a child only six years old, became famous across America when she entered the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, the first African American child to attend that school. On that day, November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges and her mother were escorted by four federal marshals past a crowd of white people shouting angry threats at Ruby, spewing hatred and promising violent death for the child.
Of that experience almost half a century ago, she now says, “No one talked about it,” in the years when she was growing up. Only when she was 19 did she start to realize what her own history meant. After looking at the famous painting of Norman Rockwell that showed her walking toward school she grasped the significance of the events that she had lived through as a child.
Now a woman approaching 50 years of age, she knows herself to be on the right path. “I believe I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” she affirms confidently. But it was not easy discovering what to do. “I went through a hard time, trying to figure it out,” she confesses.
A charming woman, her head adorned with a stylish turban, she smiles often as she interacts with the audience. She speaks with simple eloquence, holding listeners rapt in attention as she shares her vision of what the human community should be.
“I never judge anyone by the color of their skin,” this current day prophet proclaims. Despite her childhood experience of hatred, she also received love from a woman crucially important to her. This person was Mrs. Henry, a white woman from Boston, who became her teacher when Ruby was six and received her warmly. Of this formative person in her life, Ruby says: “Mrs. Henry took me into her heart, not just her classroom.”
Ruby Bridges Hall now has four sons, three of them old enough for military service, and she hopes they will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by their character. “I believe it’s time to get past our individual differences, for our children,” she states. In her view, it is extremely dangerous to teach children to trust only people like them.
Racism is her number one enemy. She calls it a form of hate, a disease. “Let’s stop using our children to spread it,” she pleads.
“Every little baby born in the hospital arrives with a clean heart,” she observes, and a fresh start. But they begin to think they are better than someone else.”
To watch Ruby Bridges Hall answer questions from small children after her talk was affecting indeed. Some of these kids first learned about her from Dr. Robert Coles’ book “The Story of Ruby Bridges” which explains to young readers the heroism of the child and her parents.
Her gentle manner and respectful attention to each questioner commended her message further. She is clearly a person who has developed spiritual depth after being tried in the fire of hatred at a young age.
It remains important for her not to hate those who have hated her; instead she reaches out to them with forgiveness. In response to a question, she told of feeling enmity, in recent years, toward one person. Ruby’s husband noticed the problem and told her: “You really need to pray.” She did so and, finally, she was able to extend her hand in friendship to that person: “I knew then that I was set free.”
That action speaks eloquently about the kind of person Ruby Bridges Hall is. One can only hope that her message of peace and love takes firmer hold in the hearts of her listeners. “It has to come from the inside,” she says of the change necessary to overcome the barriers built up by human prejudice
Richard Griffin