First Steps: This Is Your Time by Ruby Bridges

In 1969, my life was changed forever..... I was chosen to be the first black child to go to an all-white school in my hometown, New Orleans.

I didn't yet know that I had stepped into history.

In her beautifully pressed plaid school dress, big hairbow, spotless white socks, and black patent-leather Mary Jane shoes, six-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted by Federal marshalls to the school where she was to start first grade in 1960, surrounded by screaming women holding babies, teen agers, and men waving signs saying STATE'S RIGHTS. Black-and-white newpapers of that time showed the solemn little girl, still looking forward to making new friends on her first day, as she made that walk into William Frantz Elementary. What waited for her was a classroom empty of other first graders, but a teacher, Barbara Henry, who was her teacher, and in Bridges' words....,

"I FELT LOVED. SHE BECAME MY BEST FRIEND."

In the years after the Supreme Court's Brown V. Board of Education decision in 1954, public school desegregation was marked by mob violence, bombings, and endless court cases, but in the wake of that unrest in 1964, the American public had an experience that shook them to their hearts: popular artist Norman Rockwell's portrait of little Ruby on her way to school on the cover of LOOK magazine brought the politics of school integration home in the public mind. Rockwell took some artistic license in Ruby's little white dress as a counterfoil to the blood-red tomato splattered on the wall she had just walked by. The ugliness of race hatred was shown in the personal experience of one young child, and minds were changed by that iconic image.

Ruby Bridges was and is a witness of the early days of school desegregation and as an adult woman tells her own story in This Is Your Time (Delacorte Press, 2020), dedicated to Congressman John Lewis, honestly reporting that epic first day and first year of her public schooling as seen through a young child's eyes and how it changed her life, with a moving statement of hope for our mutual futures. She writes...

"IT IS LOVE AND GRACE THAT WILL ALLOW US TO SEE AND RESPECT THE MANY WAYS THAT GOD HAS MADE US UNIQUE...."

Says School Library Journal, “Timely, powerful, and full of hope. This missive of truth, spoken by a true American hero, deserves a place in all libraries.”