By: Danielle Campbell | January 15, 2024
The second graders from Lincoln Bassett Community School listened intently as former New Haven Mayor Toni Harp read from a small book. The cover featured a little brown girl who looked a lot like many of the students in the two classes.
The story Harp read was about Ruby Bridges, the first Black American to desegregate an elementary school in the United States after the passage of the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Bridges is now a 69-year-old civil rights activist and she will be the keynote speaker at Yale University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration event, which will be held Jan. 24, 2023 at Woolsey Hall. (Click here to register.)
“There were people against this,” Harp said to the students as they sat gathered at her feet on a Tuesday morning at the Stetson Library to hear about Bridges’ historic act of desegregation. “Some of their signs said ‘Race mixing is communism!’ and ‘Keep schools segregated!’” (more)