Did you know that Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate an all-white Elementary School in the South, was six when she and her mother arrived with four U.S. marshals for protection to William Frantz Elementary School?

She’s 70 now. This wasn’t ancient history.

Did you think her getting to integrate a school was the end of the story? That it became easy after that? That she took her seat in her desk in a neat little row and that it all kinda just worked out?

Ruby was greeted by a massive crowd shouting, protesting, and carrying on as she approached the school. Ruby thought it was Mardi Gras.

The white folks took their kids out of school on the first day. The second day, one white girl came back. Only one teacher, Barbara Henry, was willing to teach her – and she did so in a classroom all to herself.

Ruby, all of six years old, had to have a US Marshall escorting her to the bathroom. Ruby, a SIX-YEAR-OLD, was threatened with poisoning. Another woman threatened this six-year-old girl with a Black doll in a wooden coffin. Ruby was bullied at school.

Ruby, who – again – was SIX, had to learn that her father lost his job at the gas station, that their family couldn’t shop at the community’s grocery store, that the farm where they’d been sharecropping for generations was suddenly no longer theirs to work on.

Ruby wrote Santa a letter asking him to give her father’s job back.

One of the Marshalls assigned to her complimented her courage. “She never cried or whimpered,” he said, “She just marched along like a little soldier.”

Ruby never missed a day of school.

When they tell you that DEI is some scary boogeyman, that it divides people, that it’s the cause of some catastrophe or evil, please understand that they are full of shit.

The truth is that just over sixty years ago, grown adults thought that it was OK to make death threats against a six-year-old kid for going to their school, and the folks pushing back against DEI hope you think that 60 years is just far enough away that “things like that couldn’t happen again”.

History isn’t a novelty to gaze at with curiosity. History is informative. History shapes every day to come. What kind of future do you want to build?

“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

For further reading:

A DEI Explainer that even a 5th grader could get (because a 5th grader created it).

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ruby-bridges and https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/06/ruby-bridges-the-six-year-old-who-defied-a-mob-and-desegregated-her-school