Ruby Bridges
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7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Ruby Bridges trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In November 1960, a six-year-old girl walked into an all-white elementary school in New Orleans and into American history. Ruby Bridges did not fully understand what the crowds outside were shouting about, but she kept going back, and her story has been taught in classrooms ever since. This quiz follows that story from start to finish: her family and early childhood, the first chaotic days at school, the handful of adults who stood by her, the famous painting her walk inspired, and her later life as an author and speaker. A full set of questions covers the 1998 television movie too, from its cast and director to how it was made. It is written for students who have just read about Ruby or watched the film in class, for teachers who want a ready-made review, and for anyone who enjoys civil rights history. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Six-year-old Ruby Bridges saw the shouting crowd outside her new school in 1960 and assumed it was what?
Mardi Gras
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.
Q 02Which American artist painted Ruby Bridges's walk to school in 1960 as The Problem We All Live With?
Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell had just ended his long run at The Saturday Evening Post, frustrated by the limits it placed on political themes.
Q 03Which federal officers walked Ruby Bridges past the protesters and into her New Orleans school each day in 1960?
US Marshals
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.
Q 04To whom did young Ruby Bridges write a letter asking that her dad, fired over her schooling, get his job back?
Santa Claus
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.
Q 05What did one protester hold up inside a small coffin outside Ruby Bridges's New Orleans school in 1960?
A black doll
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.
Q 06After graduating from high school, Ruby Bridges spent 15 years in which job before becoming a full-time parent?
Travel agent
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.
Q 07Where inside her new school did Ruby Bridges and her mother spend the whole of her chaotic first day?
The principal's office
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.
Q 08Which US president displayed the Ruby Bridges painting The Problem We All Live With just outside the Oval Office?
Barack Obama
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.
Q 09Ruby Bridges was born in 1954, just months after which Supreme Court ruling outlawed segregated public schools?
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education was decided less than four months before her birth, yet New Orleans schools stayed segregated until she was six.
Q 10What was unusual about the first-grade class Ruby Bridges attended in New Orleans for a whole year?
She was its only pupil
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.
Q 11Which teacher was the only one at Ruby Bridges's New Orleans school willing to teach her in 1960?
Barbara Henry
Barbara Henry had been in the city for only two months and had taught at integrated schools for military families overseas.
Q 12What did Ruby Bridges pick up from her first-grade teacher that her second-grade teacher then criticized?
A Boston accent
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.
Q 13Which formerly all-white New Orleans school did Ruby Bridges integrate on November 14, 1960?
William Frantz Elementary
Q 21What nickname was given to the white housewives who gathered to jeer Ruby Bridges outside her school each morning?
The Cheerleaders
The Cheerleaders drew so much attention that reporters flocked to New Orleans, and the mayor eventually asked the press to leave.
Q 22Which novelist described the women jeering outside Ruby Bridges's school in his 1962 book Travels with Charley?
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck drove to New Orleans with his poodle after Thanksgiving in 1960 and watched the protests, an encounter that left him depressed.
Q 23Which child psychiatrist volunteered to counsel Ruby Bridges at home every week during her first year at the school?
Robert Coles
William Frantz Elementary stood only five blocks from her home, yet she had been sent to a segregated kindergarten several miles away.
Q 14In which state was Ruby Bridges born in 1954, before her family moved to New Orleans in search of work?
Mississippi
Mississippi was home only in her earliest years: she was born in Tylertown, where her parents and grandparents farmed as sharecroppers.
Q 15Which civil rights organization asked Ruby Bridges's parents to volunteer her to integrate a New Orleans school?
The NAACP
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.
Q 16What did Ruby Bridges and five other Black children pass in 1960 to qualify for New Orleans's all-white schools?
An entrance exam
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.
Q 17Which relative of Ruby Bridges at first opposed sending her to an all-white school, fearing trouble?
Her father
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.
Q 18Abon Bridges, whose daughter Ruby integrated a New Orleans school in 1960, was a veteran of which war?
Korean 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.
Q 19What happened to Ruby Bridges's grandparents after she enrolled at an all-white New Orleans school in 1960?
Evicted from their farm
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.
Q 20On Ruby Bridges's second day, a white man of which profession walked his daughter through the mob to class?
Methodist minister
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.
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.
Q 24As an adult, Ruby Bridges learned that the smart dresses she wore to school in 1960 came from whom?
Her psychiatrist's relative
Her psychiatrist's relative sent the dresses, socks and shoes seen in the famous photographs. Her own family could never have afforded them.
Q 25What did Lucille Bridges tell her daughter Ruby to do if she felt afraid while walking past the mob?
Say her prayers
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.
Q 26What did lonely first-grader Ruby Bridges secretly do with the sandwiches her mother packed for school lunch?
Hid them in a cabinet
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.
Q 27Which 2005 hurricane flooded Ruby Bridges's home and badly damaged the New Orleans school she had integrated?
Katrina
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.
Q 28Ruby Bridges helped protect the New Orleans school she integrated by campaigning to win it which historic status?
National Register listing
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.
Q 29In the 1990s, Ruby Bridges went back to the New Orleans school she had once integrated to work in which role?
Parent liaison
Parent liaison became her job after her youngest brother was killed and she began caring for his four daughters, who were enrolled there.
Q 30Which 1999 memoir by Ruby Bridges won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award the following year?
Through My Eyes
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.