The New Orleans School Desegregation Crisis

On This Day in History: November 14, 1960

Norman Rockwell painted The Problem We All Live With in 1964. It depicts a young Black girl being escorted to elementary school by four deputy U.S. Marshals. They walk past a tomato-splattered wall with the n-word and “KKK” scrawled on it. The painting reflects a real person, a real event.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 14, 1960--

No child should have to experience the horrors that six-year-old Ruby Bridges did, but many places were, and remain, racist as fuck. I mean, shit, the town of Cleveland, Mississippi didn’t desegregate its schools until 20-fucking-16. In 1960 New Orleans, Ruby required police protection to attend a previously all-white school because of the threat of violence.

It was called the “New Orleans school desegregation crisis.” I’m uncertain about the use of the word “crisis.” Is a whole bunch of people being so ridiculously fucking racist as to threaten a little girl with death a “crisis,” or something else? An obscenity? A diaper stain on human history? And it wasn’t just Ruby Bridges. On November 14, 1960, two schools were desegregated in the city. Three girls went to McDonough No. 19 Elementary, and Ruby Bridges attended William Frantz Elementary. All four were escorted by U.S. Marshals. Whites boycotted the schools, refusing to allow their children to attend the same school as Black children.

Bridges and the “McDonough Three” had to pass a test to prove they were “worthy” to attend the white schools. As young Ruby entered the school with her armed escort, a crowd of psychopathically racist assnuggets shrieked obscenities and threw things at her. One of the marshals escorting Ruby that day, Charles Burks, later said, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier.”

Only one person, Barbara Henry, agreed to be Ruby’s teacher. Ruby went to her classroom and the only other person in the room was her teacher. She would remain the only student in the class for over a year.

Her father hadn’t wanted Ruby to attend the school, but her mother saw it as an important “step forward” for all Black children in their community. Eventually, the white boycott of the school subsided, but the Bridges family still experienced horrors from the community. Every morning as she walked to school a woman called out threats to Ruby, saying she was going to poison the girl, and another woman held up a Black doll in a little coffin. Fucking hell what is wrong with people? Also, her father was fired from his job and their local grocery store refused to let them shop there any longer.

Ruby Bridges later became a civil rights activist. At her suggestion, President Obama had Rockwell’s painting of her hung outside the Oval Office for several months in 2011. While looking at the painting with Bridges, the president told her, “If it hadn’t been for you,” he said, paying homage to Black women like Bridges who have always taken the lead in the civil rights movement, “I might not be here.”

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