Ruby bridges family
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Ruby Bridges (1954 – ) is an American civil rights activist who became the first black child to enter a previously all-white elementary school in Louisiana. By breaking the long-standing colour bar to school integration, she became a symbol of the civil rights movement and a new era of racial integration in American schools.
Bridges was born 8 September 1954, in Tylertown, Mississipi. Both her parents Lucille and Abon Bridges were poor farmers, working on the sharecropping system. Ruby was the eldest of five children and as a child was responsible for looking after her younger siblings. When she was two years old the family moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where her father gained work as a gas station attendant.
In May 1954 (just a few months before Bridges was born), the Supreme Court had passed a landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. This ruled that the policy of segregation in southern schools was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. However, despite the ruling, southern states were deeply committed to a policy of segregation and they made no
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Ruby Bridges
By Shay Dawson; Edited by Corina Gonzalez (2025)
Ruby Bridges has always been a civil rights advocate, with her experience as the first Black child to enter an all-white school in the South making her a household name.
Though her experience in school was harrowing due to blatant racism and the targeting of her family, Bridges never missed a day of school.
Presently, the Ruby Bridges Foundation and Bridges herself continue to host speaking engagements and write children’s books to strive for an end to racism in America.
“All of us are standing on someone else’s shoulders. Someone else that opened the door and paved the way. And so, we have to understand that we cannot give up the fight, whether we see the fruits of our labor or not. You have a responsibility to open the door to keep this moving forward,” Ruby Bridges, The Guardian, 2021
Early Life
Ruby Bridges was born on September 8, 1954, to Abon and Lucille Bridges, who had married the previous year and lived in Tylertown, Mississippi. Abon worked as a mechanic and was a veteran o
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Ruby Bridges
American civil rights activist (born 1954)
For the 1998 television film, see Ruby Bridges (film).
Ruby Nell Bridges Hall (born September 8, 1954) is an American civil rights activist. She was the first African American child to attend formerly whites-only William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis on November 14, 1960.[1][2][3] She is the subject of a 1964 painting, The Problem We All Live With, by Norman Rockwell.
Early life
Bridges was the eldest of five children born to Abon and Lucille Bridges.[4] As a child, she spent much time taking care of her younger siblings,[5] though she also enjoyed playing jump rope and softball and climbing trees.[6] When she was four years old, the family relocated from Tylertown, Mississippi, where Bridges was born, to New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1960, when she was six years old, her parents responded to a request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and volunteered her t
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