Six-year-old Ruby Bridges is escorted by United States deputy marshals at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, in November 1960. The first-grader was the only Black child enrolled in the school, where parents of white students boycotted the court-ordered integration law.
Credit: AP/Wide World

On November 10, Lucille Bridges—the mother of the famous civil rights icon Ruby Bridges—died at the age of 86. Ruby Bridges became one of the first Black children to integrate an elementary school in the Deep South region of the United States. In 1960, Ruby was a 6-year-old first-grader. Lucille enrolled her as the only Black student at the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Every day for the first year of classes, angry mobs met Lucille as she walked her daughter to school. Together, the mother and daughter helped to advance civil rights for all Black Americans.

In 1954, with the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court of the United States declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. By 1960, however, several Southern states still had no Black students enrolled in public schools with white students. That year, a federal judge ordered that New Orleans public schools desegregate at the beginning of the 1960 school year.

During the spring of 1960, Bridges was tested and selected from a group of other Black kindergarteners by the New Orleans school board to participate in a school integration program. In the summer, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) approached Bridges’s parents and encouraged them to participate in the integration program by enrolling Ruby as the first Black student at William Frantz Elementary School. The Bridges agreed, because the school provided a better education and was closer to the family’s home than the all-Black elementary school where Ruby attended kindergarten.

On Nov. 14, 1960, federal marshals escorted Bridges on her first day of school, where the child was met by angry mobs. Parents of white students boycotted the court-ordered integration and took their children out of the school. Many of the school’s teachers walked out. Bridges’s parents and grandparents lost their jobs as a result of the controversy.

Bridges was taught by a white teacher named Barbara Henry, and she was the only student in her class for the entire school year. By the time Bridges entered second grade, the school had been successfully integrated. There were no more protests, and Bridges was able to attend the school unescorted. Later, Bridges graduated from Francis T. Nicholls High School (now Frederick Douglass High School), an integrated high school in New Orleans.