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It started with Ruby Bridges

I am sharing this week and in posts to follow, a few influences--videos, books, people, places, stories--that have helped me notice my blindspots with regard to racial justice. The story is ever growing. In fact, sometimes the more I learn, the harder it is to write. So I'll just start here, hoping that if I tell one or two stories, it could be a way forward to you reading or telling one or two more stories, and that could be a way forward for all of us. 





I remember sitting on the couch with my seven-year old daughter and reading to her The Story of Ruby Bridges. Ruby, a brave black girl whose parents were perhaps even braver, to agree to let her integrate the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. My daughter studied the watercolor illustrations of the angry white parents yelling at Ruby as she walked into the school protected by federal marshals. 


I remember uncomfortable shock at the teacher who criticized Ruby for talking back to the mob, when in fact Ruby was praying for them--praying a simple but powerful prayer of forgiveness for those who were tormenting her week after week. In the afterword, however, we read not that parents suddenly realized how wrong their actions were in vilifying a child for trying to go to school with their children. Rather, some parents finally got upset that their own children were missing out on an education, so they relented and let them go back to school. But the truth after the book is that new forms of segregation sprang up, forms of segregation and control that I've been a part of: Christian schools and private schools and perhaps even homeschooling.  But when my daughter turned to me at the end of the book and said, "This doesn't happen anymore, right?" I answered immediately, "No, it doesn't happen anymore." And in one sense, that was true: children like Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine were trailblazers who worked to test Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared school segregation based on race to be illegal. 



Around the same time my daughter and I would read about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And like any curious child, my daughter would ask, "But now everyone is treated equally, right?" And at first I would say, "Yes, yes, everyone is treated equally." But somewhere between the answers to a child's questions and reading the news, the answers started to feel a little hollow. I tried to have a little longer focus on Black History, to spend a little more time on the Civil Rights movement. But I still wanted to present it as an open and shut case--look--slavery is over, Civil Rights movement--done. Now everyone is treated equally. But I was beginning to learn there was more to the story. 

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