5 Powerful Quotes From Ruby Bridges To Celebrate Her 63rd Birthday - Because of Them We Can (2024)

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5 Powerful Quotes From Ruby Bridges To Celebrate Her 63rd Birthday - Because of Them We Can? ›

Ruby's messages of tolerance and mutual respect are so urgent right now. Equal access to a quality education for all children remains the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement and the nation. Our country must wake up and stop the backwards slide away from fair treatment for poor and non-White children.

Ruby's messages of tolerance and mutual respect are so urgent right now. Equal access to a quality education for all children remains the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement and the nation. Our country must wake up and stop the backwards slide away from fair treatment for poor and non-White children.

“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.” “Each person must live their life as a model for others.” “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free…so other people would also be free.” “I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move.”

Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American Hero. She was the first African American child to desegregate William Frantz Elementary School. At six years old, Ruby's bravery helped pave the way for Civil Rights action in the American South.

Bridges' speech focused on her first year at the all-white elementary school, and the consequences she saw as a result. She described her innocent perception of what was happening, thinking the angry mobs were a Mardi Gras parade, and that she was the only kid in the school.

When she was four years old, her family moved to New Orleans. Two years later a test was given to the city's African American schoolchildren to determine which students could enter all-white schools. Bridges passed the test and was selected for enrollment at the city's William Frantz Elementary School.

Wear purple! It's Ruby's favorite color. Ask your school to participate.

Bridges says she sees her 6-year-old self enduring a lonely and confusing year in the children's letters. After walking past mobs of protesters, Bridges attended classes alone — and did so for the full year. Some white families permanently withdrew their children from the school because Bridges was a student there.

What caused Rosa Parks' death? ›

On October 24th, 2005, at the age of 92, she died of natural causes leaving behind a rich legacy of resistance against racial discrimination and injustice.

She and her husband never had children and she outlived her only sibling. She was survived by her sister-in-law (Raymond's sister), 13 nieces and nephews and their families, and several cousins, most of them residents of Michigan or Alabama.

We will fail when we fail to try. Rosa Parks, an iconic figure in the civil rights movement, reminds us with her powerful quote that in order to bring about change, we must overcome our fear and take the first step towards transformation.

“Don't follow the path. Go where there is no path and begin the trail. When you start a new trail equipped with courage, strength and conviction, the only thing that can stop you is you!”

It is more complex to acknowledge that Ruby Bridges is still alive than to imagine her as that kid in the black-and-white photo.

At the tender age of six, Ruby Bridges advanced the cause of civil rights in November 1960 when she became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the South.

Learning that you can never judge anyone from the outside was the first lesson of that tumultuous year. A second was that we must all “become brothers and sisters:” “We must absolutely take care of one another. It does take a village, but we have to be a village first.

What made Ruby Bridges an inspiring leader was that she was so young, and being that age people thought if she could do it they could as well. Most importantly, she wanted change, she wanted to be equal. As said in the quote above her actions became a shared effort, vision, and success.

On November 14, 1960, 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.