Bridges has described the crowd outside the school as resembling Mardi Gras and Deputy Marshal Charles Burks, who was one of her escorts, saluted her courage, saying he was very proud of her. Parents immediately boycotted the school, pulling out their children, and teachers refused to work while Bridges was a pupil. Barbara Henry, a Bostonian, was the only teacher willing to educate Ruby and taught her alone for more than a year. Lloyd Anderson Foreman, a Methodist minister, was the first white parent to break the boycott , walking through the mob with his daughter, Pam.
Other students gradually returned throughout the week. Bridges received counseling from child psychiatrist Robert Coles throughout the year. As an adult, Ruby Bridges Hall worked as a travel agent before becoming a full-time parent of four. In , she was reunited with Pam Foreman Testroet, the first white child to break the parental boycott. When she had to go to the restroom, the federal marshals walked her down the hall. Several years later, federal marshal Charles Burks, one of her escorts, commented with some pride that Bridges showed a lot of courage.
She never cried or whimpered, Burks said, "She just marched along like a little soldier. The abuse wasn't limited to only Bridges; her family suffered as well.
Her father lost his job at the filling station, and her grandparents were sent off the land they had sharecropped for over 25 years. The grocery store where the family shopped banned them from entering.
However, many others in the community, both Black and white, began to show support in a variety of ways. Gradually, many families began to send their children back to the school and the protests and civil disturbances seemed to subside as the year went on. A neighbor provided Bridges' father with a job, while others volunteered to babysit the four children, watch the house as protectors, and walk behind the federal marshals on the trips to school.
After winter break, Bridges began to show signs of stress. She experienced nightmares and would wake her mother in the middle of the night seeking comfort. For a time, she stopped eating lunch in her classroom, which she usually ate alone. Wanting to be with the other students, she would not eat the sandwiches her mother packed for her, but instead hid them in a storage cabinet in the classroom.
Soon, a janitor discovered the mice and cockroaches who had found the sandwiches. The incident led Mrs. Henry to lunch with Bridges in the classroom. Bridges started seeing child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who volunteered to provide counseling during her first year at Frantz School. He was very concerned about how such a young girl would handle the pressure. He saw Bridges once a week either at school or at her home.
During these sessions, he would just let her talk about what she was experiencing. Sometimes his wife came too and, like Dr. Coles, she was very caring toward Bridges.
Coles later wrote a series of articles for Atlantic Monthly and eventually a series of books on how children handle change, including a children's book on Bridges' experience.
Near the end of the first year, things began to settle down. A few white children in Bridges' grade returned to the school. Occasionally, Bridges got a chance to visit with them. By her own recollection many years later, Bridges was not that aware of the extent of the racism that erupted over her attending the school. But when another child rejected Bridges' friendship because of her race, she began to slowly understand.
By Bridges' second year at Frantz School, it seemed everything had changed. Henry's contract wasn't renewed, and so she and her husband returned to Boston. There were also no more federal marshals; Bridges walked to school every day by herself. There were other students in her second-grade class, and the school began to see full enrollment again. No one talked about the past year. It seemed everyone wanted to put the experience behind them.
Bridges finished grade school and graduated from the integrated Francis T. Ruby Bridges was born in Tylertown, Mississippi on September 8, At the age of two, she moved to New Orleans with her parents, Abon and Lucille Bridges, to seek better opportunities for their family. When Ruby was in kindergarten, she was chosen to take a test to determine if she could attend an all-white school.
This was due to the Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education which ordered all schools to desegregate. Ruby was one of six students to pass the test and her parents decided to send her to an all-white elementary school to receive a better education. On November 14, , at the age of six, Ruby became the very first African American child to attend the all-white public William Frantz Elementary School. Ruby and her Mother were escorted by federal marshals to the school.
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