Like Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Bridges has become a symbolic “bridge” in the American Civil Rights movement. Well known as the inspiration for the famous Norman Rockwell painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” she will speak at the DAI on Thursday evening in connection with the current exhibition “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell.” The lecture is sold out.
The iconic painting, featuring a brave little girl being bombarded with tomatoes as she symbolically integrates an elementary school, was shipped to the Dayton museum directly from the White House where it was on display in the West Wing at the request of President Barack Obama. It first appeared on the cover of Look magazine in 1964.
The actual incident took place six years after the landmark 1954 United States Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling declaring that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. Bridges’ parents, approached by the NAACP, agreed to send their daughter to the all-white school.
“My parents were just ordinary sharecroppers from Mississippi who weren’t able to attend school and wanted a formal education for their children,” said Bridges in a phone interview, adding that she has always believed ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
Now 57, she remembers that momentous day as an exciting one.
“Neighbors stopped by the house to help me get dressed, everyone was full of anticipation,” she said. “The day I showed up, (white) parents rushed in and took their children out of school. The next day the class was empty, and I was alone in the class for a year. My teacher came from Boston and was the nicest person. She was like another mom to me. I loved school and never missed a day.”
Her entire family was affected dramatically: her father lost his job, and her grandparents were thrown off their land.
Bridges, a member of the board of directors of the Norman Rockwell Museum, published her memoir, “Through My Eyes,” in 1999.
“I believe in my heart that if we are to get past our racial differences it’s going to come through our children,” Bridges said. “Kids are not born knowing anything about disliking one another, racism is something that’s passed down. What a parent can do is to make absolutely sure that their child keeps that fresh, clean heart that they’re born with.”
As head of the Ruby Bridges Foundation, Bridges is working to develop programs for young people about diversity, community and family. She lives in New Orleans and is planning to apply for a charter to run the very school that she once integrated. It was hit by Hurricane Katrina and is slated to reopen in 2013.
The Ruby Bridges School of Community Service and Social Justice, she hopes, will be a model for schools across the nation.
“American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell” is on loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. and includes 42 original paintings and all of Rockwell’s 323 covers from The Saturday Evening Post.
The museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today in honor of Martin Luther King Day.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2440 or MMoss@DaytonDaily News.com.
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