Now I Know Her Name

Her name was Ruby Bridges.

I didn't know her name when I was a kid, but I can't count how many times I saw the stock footage of her walking down the steps of that New Orleans schoolhouse when I was growing up.

found on the
Forum of the American Journal of Education

Being a white kid growing up in an almost all-white school in suburban Phoenix, I had no idea how to process what I saw in that clip. I really couldn't grasp the anger that would drive outwardly normal people to scream and threaten a school girl. Of course, I also struggled to understand why a kid would fight so hard to be allowed to go to school.

But as crass and as dumb as I was, the lesson still sank in: you, Tad, don't have to fight and struggle for what other people have to fight and struggle for. Years later, when the viral image illustrating the difference between "equality" and "equity" was circulating, I already understood that there was a third, unpictured frame in which the biggest kid is attacking the littlest kid and knocking him off his boxes.

I had seen that happening to Ruby Bridges.

Listening to Malcolm Gladwell tell the Revisionist History version of the story behind Brown vs. Board of Education, I realized for the first time that not only did the little girl in that footage take on a burden that I had never been asked to carry, but if we were wise, she wouldn't have had to carry it, either. When it came time to desegregate our schools, the teachers should have been first - not the students. Putting them through that ordeal would have still been awful, and it would have still been a powerful image to see public servants being attacked by that same crowd, but history demanded that a child suffer through the experience instead.

But now I know her name.

Ruby is featured on Card #45 of Vol. 2: Women, from Urban Intellectuals. awesome sets of educational Black History Flashcards.

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