Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary

She was six years old, and she wore a white dress with white ribbons in her hair, and she walked through them.

On November fourteenth, nineteen sixty, Ruby Bridges was escorted by four United States federal marshals through a crowd of white adults screaming outside William Frantz Elementary School in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. A federal court order had mandated the integration of New Orleans public schools. Ruby Bridges was one of several Black children assigned to white schools that morning. She was the only one who arrived at William Frantz.

The school's white teachers refused to teach her. All of them refused except one: Barbara Henry, a teacher from Boston who had taken the job that year and who found herself, on the first day, alone in a classroom with a six-year-old and no other students. White parents had pulled their children from the building in protest. For weeks, and in some cases for the entire school year, Ruby Bridges and Barbara Henry were alone together in that classroom.

Norman Rockwell painted the scene from a newspaper photograph he had seen. The painting is titled "The Problem We All Live With." It shows Ruby Bridges from behind, in her white dress, flanked by marshals, tomatoes and a slur hurled against the wall behind her. The marshals' faces are not visible. Her face is not visible. Rockwell chose the angle carefully: the viewer cannot look away from the child walking forward.

Ruby Bridges went on to found the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which works on racial equity in education. She is alive. The school building at three thousand eight hundred eleven North Galvez Street is still standing and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Sixty-five years after that walk, the country is still having the argument those screaming adults were making.