50 Fun Facts About Ruby Bridges

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges saw the shouting crowd outside her new school in 1960 and assumed it was what?

Mardi Gras was her guess because people were throwing things and shouting, as New Orleans crowds do at carnival. Nobody had told her the anger was aimed at her.

Which American artist painted Ruby Bridges's walk to school in 1960 as The Problem We All Live With?

Norman Rockwell had just ended his long run at The Saturday Evening Post, frustrated by the limits it placed on political themes.

Which federal officers walked Ruby Bridges past the protesters and into her New Orleans school each day in 1960?

US Marshals drove her the five blocks to school, then walked two in front of her and two behind. One later recalled that she never cried and marched like a little soldier.

To whom did young Ruby Bridges write a letter asking that her dad, fired over her schooling, get his job back?

Santa Claus got the request because she felt partly to blame for the firing. The family was living on donations while her dad stayed out of work.

What did one protester hold up inside a small coffin outside Ruby Bridges's New Orleans school in 1960?

A black doll in a coffin was waved at her morning after morning. She later said she had nightmares of the coffin flying around her bedroom.

After graduating from high school, Ruby Bridges spent 15 years in which job before becoming a full-time parent?

Travel agent for American Express was the job, taken partly because she wanted to get out of Louisiana. She had first applied to be a flight attendant.

Where inside her new school did Ruby Bridges and her mother spend the whole of her chaotic first day?

The principal's office was as far as they got, because angry parents were marching in to pull their children out. Her lessons began the next day.

Which US president displayed the Ruby Bridges painting The Problem We All Live With just outside the Oval Office?

Barack Obama hung it there at her suggestion. When the two viewed it together, he told her he might not have been there without what she and others had done.

Ruby Bridges was born in 1954, just months after which Supreme Court ruling outlawed segregated public schools?

Brown v. Board of Education was decided less than four months before her birth, yet New Orleans schools stayed segregated until she was six.

What was unusual about the first-grade class Ruby Bridges attended in New Orleans for a whole year?

She was its only pupil because white parents pulled their children out. When a few returned, they were kept in separate rooms until late in the year.

Which teacher was the only one at Ruby Bridges's New Orleans school willing to teach her in 1960?

Barbara Henry had been in the city for only two months and had taught at integrated schools for military families overseas.

What did Ruby Bridges pick up from her first-grade teacher that her second-grade teacher then criticized?

A Boston accent rubbed off after a year of lessons from a Massachusetts woman. The teacher who criticized it had refused to teach her the year before.

Which formerly all-white New Orleans school did Ruby Bridges integrate on November 14, 1960?

William Frantz Elementary stood only five blocks from her home, yet she had been sent to a segregated kindergarten several miles away.

In which state was Ruby Bridges born in 1954, before her family moved to New Orleans in search of work?

Mississippi was home only in her earliest years: she was born in Tylertown, where her parents and grandparents farmed as sharecroppers.

Which civil rights organization asked Ruby Bridges's parents to volunteer her to integrate a New Orleans school?

The NAACP and its lawyers had been fighting school segregation in New Orleans courts since the early 1950s. The group later advised her dad not to go out seeking work, for his own safety.

What did Ruby Bridges and five other Black children pass in 1960 to qualify for New Orleans's all-white schools?

An entrance exam was set by the school board and, by some accounts, written to be especially hard so that the city's schools could stay segregated longer.

Which relative of Ruby Bridges at first opposed sending her to an all-white school, fearing trouble?

Her father, Abon, was talked round by her mother, Lucille. Both had grown up sharecropping with little schooling, and she wanted their children to have the chances they had missed.

Abon Bridges, whose daughter Ruby integrated a New Orleans school in 1960, was a veteran of which war?

Korean War service did not protect him: he lost his job at a service station once his daughter's enrollment made the family notorious.

What happened to Ruby Bridges's grandparents after she enrolled at an all-white New Orleans school in 1960?

Evicted from their farm after a quarter-century of working it, they did not even live in Louisiana, which shows how far the backlash reached.

On Ruby Bridges's second day, a white man of which profession walked his daughter through the mob to class?

Methodist minister Lloyd Foreman said he simply wanted the privilege of taking his child to school. Fifty years on, his daughter Pam met the adult Bridges at a reunion.

What nickname was given to the white housewives who gathered to jeer Ruby Bridges outside her school each morning?

The Cheerleaders drew so much attention that reporters flocked to New Orleans, and the mayor eventually asked the press to leave.

Which novelist described the women jeering outside Ruby Bridges's school in his 1962 book Travels with Charley?

John Steinbeck drove to New Orleans with his poodle after Thanksgiving in 1960 and watched the protests, an encounter that left him depressed.

Which child psychiatrist volunteered to counsel Ruby Bridges at home every week during her first year at the school?

Robert Coles had watched her walk through the mob. The book series on children under stress that grew out of that work later won him a Pulitzer Prize.

As an adult, Ruby Bridges learned that the smart dresses she wore to school in 1960 came from whom?

Her psychiatrist's relative sent the dresses, socks and shoes seen in the famous photographs. Her own family could never have afforded them.

What did Lucille Bridges tell her daughter Ruby to do if she felt afraid while walking past the mob?

Say her prayers was the advice, and the six-year-old found that praying on the way in made the insults easier to bear and gave her courage.

What did lonely first-grader Ruby Bridges secretly do with the sandwiches her mother packed for school lunch?

She hid them in a cabinet because she wanted to eat with other children. A janitor found the mice and cockroaches, and after that her teacher joined her for lunch.

Which 2005 hurricane flooded Ruby Bridges's home and badly damaged the New Orleans school she had integrated?

Hurricane Katrina left five feet of water on the school's ground floor, at a time when the city was already considering closing the building.

Ruby Bridges helped protect the New Orleans school she integrated by campaigning to win it which historic status?

National Register listing as a historic place freed funds to restore the flooded building, and room 2306, her old classroom, was returned to its 1960s appearance.

In the 1990s, Ruby Bridges went back to the New Orleans school she had once integrated to work in which role?

Parent liaison became her job after her youngest brother was killed and she began caring for his four daughters, who were enrolled there.

Which 1999 memoir by Ruby Bridges won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award the following year?

Through My Eyes came out in the same year she set up her foundation, which was funded partly by proceeds from an earlier picture book about her.

Which honor, the second-highest civilian award in the United States, did Ruby Bridges receive in January 2001?

Presidential Citizens Medal recipients are recognized for exemplary deeds or services for their country or fellow citizens, a standard she met at the age of six.

Which tennis champion entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in the same 2024 ceremony as Ruby Bridges?

Serena Williams and Bridges were honored together by the hall, which sits in Seneca Falls, New York, the town known for an early women's rights convention.

An Indianapolis museum exhibit tells Ruby Bridges's story beside Anne Frank's and which Indiana teenager's?

Ryan White was barred from his school after an AIDS diagnosis. The exhibit, The Power of Children, also re-creates the classroom where Bridges was taught.

Which New Orleans university awarded Ruby Bridges an honorary degree at its 2012 graduation in the Superdome?

Tulane University was not the first to honor her: in 1995 Connecticut College gave degrees to her and her childhood psychiatrist, their first public appearance together.

Which magazine first published the Ruby Bridges painting The Problem We All Live With, in January 1964?

Look offered the artist a forum for civil rights subjects, and the picture, printed as a centerfold, brought him letters of both praise and criticism.

In the Ruby Bridges painting The Problem We All Live With, which thrown food is splattered on the wall behind her?

A tomato lies smashed below a wall that also carries a scrawled slur and the letters KKK. The crowd is unseen because the viewer stands where it stood.

How did the painter of The Problem We All Live With make Ruby Bridges the only fully visible person?

He cropped the guards' heads at the shoulders, so the four men become anonymous figures and the eye goes straight to the six-year-old.

Three years before Ruby Bridges's walk, federal troops escorted which Black students into an all-white high school?

The Little Rock Nine entered Central High in 1957 under the protection of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, sent by President Eisenhower.

The school Ruby Bridges integrated in 1960 stood in which working-class part of New Orleans?

The Ninth Ward held both schools integrated that day, in areas with many working-class white families, most of whom pulled their children out within days.

On which daytime TV program were Ruby Bridges and her first-grade teacher reunited as adults in the 1990s?

The Oprah Winfrey Show brought them together soon after a picture book revived the story and the teacher, by then back in Massachusetts, got in touch.

The 1998 TV film Ruby Bridges first aired as an installment of which long-running family anthology series?

The Wonderful World of Disney had returned to a regular network slot only the year before, and the studio's chief executive appeared in the film's introduction.

Which US president introduced the television film Ruby Bridges to its first viewers from inside the White House?

Bill Clinton shared the introduction with Michael Eisner, the head of the studio that made the film, before its premiere in January 1998.

Which director of the 1998 TV film Ruby Bridges was the first Black woman to direct for a major Hollywood studio?

Euzhan Palcy, from Martinique, broke that barrier with A Dry White Season in 1989, a film whose cause moved Marlon Brando to come out of retirement.

Which actress, a teacher in Kindergarten Cop, played Ruby Bridges's teacher in the 1998 TV film Ruby Bridges?

Penelope Ann Miller played the newcomer who takes the class nobody else will. Five years earlier she had starred opposite Al Pacino in Carlito's Way.

Which actor from The Usual Suspects played the psychiatrist who counsels the girl in the 1998 film Ruby Bridges?

Kevin Pollak, a comedian and impressionist also seen in A Few Good Men, played the doctor, with Jean Louisa Kelly as the doctor's wife, Jane.

Which Waiting to Exhale star played Lucille, the six-year-old's mother, in the 1998 TV film Ruby Bridges?

Lela Rochon had started out on screen in the 1980s as one of the Spudettes in more than 30 Spuds MacKenzie beer commercials.

Which young actress played the six-year-old title role in the 1998 television film Ruby Bridges?

Chaz Monet won a Young Artist Award for the part, one of four prizes the film collected.

In 2023, a parent's complaint led a school in which state to review showing the film Ruby Bridges to second-graders?

Florida was where the objection arose. A committee of teachers, parents and community members watched the film and declined to ban it.

Although set in New Orleans, the 1998 TV film Ruby Bridges was shot entirely in which other state?

North Carolina hosted the whole shoot in the port city of Wilmington, which stood in for 1960 New Orleans throughout the two-hour film.

What role did the real Ruby Bridges have behind the scenes of the 1998 television film about her childhood?

Consultant was her role on the film, which arrived three years after a picture book had returned her story to public attention.