Norman Rockwell had extraordinary talent for illustrating ordinary moments. (Many Rockwell paintings are on display at the BYU Museum of Art through Feb. 13.) From prayers at grandparents’ dining tables to whispers at children’s bedsides. From summer swimming-hole adventures to family station-wagon vacations. From conversations at local diners to public comments at town halls. Rockwell captured the everyday experience of American life.
And that makes Rockwell’s iconic painting of Ruby Bridges — marching amidst U.S. marshals protecting her from a hostile crowd — all the more chilling to our national consciousness. Its title “The Problem We All Live With” underscores the then all too ordinary reality of pernicious racism. As we commemorate the Civil Rights movement today, Ruby Bridges’ example reminds us that ordinary Americans strengthened by faith are at the heart of extraordinary events.
Ruby recalls her childhood as comfortable and safe, filled with jacks and jump rope. But that changed in 1960, six years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Ruby was one of four first-graders selected to integrate two elementary schools. She was sent alone to William Frantz Public School.
On Ruby’s first day, 150 protesters gathered outside. They chanted, “Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate.” Six-year-old Ruby was oblivious to the meaning, and later recalled singing the rhyme to jump rope. She would not understand the cause for the commotion until months later, when a classmate told her, “I can’t play with you. My mama said not to because you’re a nigger.”
As she left school that first day, Ruby saw someone in the crowd carrying a black doll in a coffin. Her autobiography "Through My Eyes" shows a photograph of smiling demonstrators posing with the coffin for the cameras — a haunting image. When Ruby arrived the next day, some spat at her and shouted, “Go home, nigger.” One woman screamed, “I'm going to poison you. I'll find a way.” Ruby recalls, “She made the same threat every morning.”
Ruby was not their only target. The crowd also threatened each white student, hoping to shut down the school entirely. After several days, only three of the 576 white children arrived for school.
One was the daughter of the Rev. Lloyd Foreman, a Methodist minister undeterred by the raucous mob. Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck described how a group known colloquially as the “cheerleaders” hurled insults at the minister and his daughter: “No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. … But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate.”
Another white student endured for three weeks, but the little girl awoke one night screaming. She pleaded not to be sent back to school with “those ugly ladies; those ladies who yell so ugly.” Her family packed up and left Louisiana.
Ruby also had nightmares. “Did you say your prayers before you went to sleep?” her mother would ask. “Honey, that’s why you’re having a bad dream. Go back now, and say your prayers.” Remembering those moments, Ruby writes, “Somehow it always worked. Kneeling at the side of my bed and talking to the Lord made everything okay.” She also remembers: “My mother and our pastor always said you have to pray for your enemies and people who do you wrong, and that’s what I did.”
Ruby’s prayers are the subject of the children’s book "The Story of Ruby Bridges" by Dr. Robert Coles. Concerned about the trauma to Ruby, Coles had offered counseling. One school morning, Ruby’s teacher watched as Ruby stopped in front of the screaming mob. Her lips moved. Coles later asked Ruby what she had said to the crowd. “I wasn’t talking,” Ruby responded. “I was praying for them.” When Coles asked why, Ruby answered, “Well, don’t you think they need praying for?”
Every morning and afternoon, she said the same prayer: “Please, Dear God, forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing.” Recognizing the words of Jesus, Coles reflected in an interview, “Now, I’d heard that some place before. … It silenced me.” Ruby’s parents could not read or write, Coles noted, “and yet they had taught her biblical truths in a way that she was to live them out. I would like to see some of us who have fancy educations bring up our children similarly.”
It is fitting that Norman Rockwell gave us the enduring image of Ruby Bridges. Few routines could be more ordinary than a child’s daily arrival to school. Yet little Ruby was at the center of an extraordinary conflict. How did she endure? By the most ordinary of means — prayer. It’s hidden from Rockwell’s painting, but when faced with “The Problem We All Live With,” Ruby sought help from a source of strength available to each of us.
America changed as a little girl outlasted her enemies by praying for them.
Michael Erikcson is an attorney in Salt Lake City.