By: Yale News | January 25, 2024
American civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who became a symbol of the movement when she integrated an all-white elementary school as a young girl in the early 1960s, spoke about the continued fight for educational justice during Yale’s annual commemoration of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 24.
During the conversation, held in Woolsey Hall, Bridges was joined by William Johnson, an educator, strategist, and director of the Connecticut-based William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, and Yale College senior Stephanie Owusu.
Bridges, an activist and author, was 6 years old when, in November 1960, flanked by federal marshals, she entered William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, the first student to integrate an elementary school in the U.S. South. (The occasion was immortalized in Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With.”) (more)