She Persisted: Ruby Bridges is part of a chapter book series that is authored by Chelsea Clinton with a series of children’s authors. And it’s based on the She Persisted picture book that Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger published several years ago. The Ruby Bridges’ book in particular is about a young girl, Ruby Bridges, who was six years old in 1960 and she was the first Black student to integrate her elementary school in New Orleans. And so, she faced down a jeering crowd of people who did not want to see integration happen.
She was escorted into her school building every day by U.S. marshals who protected her from the crowd who was literally threatening to attack her or hurt her or her family. And she went every day to school through that crowd, sat alone in her classroom, because all the white parents pulled their kids out of the school and she was one of the trail blazers for civil rights, because that image of this little girl with the bows in her hair walking through this jeering crowd protected by these big U.S. marshals was an iconic image of the Civil Rights Movement.
And a very, very powerful statement about integration and the need and importance of integration that we would put a six-year-old girl on the front line of something like that was a really, really powerful message. And, you know, I think it’s particularly powerful because Ruby was just so young. She was six years old. She’s the same age as the readers of that chapter book series and I think that seeing Ruby be so brave and do such a big thing, but also not such a big thing. She went to school every day.
A lot of six-year-olds can understand that, because that’s what most of them do every day, they go to school. But in that place and time that really, really ordinary thing of going to school became this extraordinary act of protest. And so I think it shows us that no matter how young you are, by doing ordinary things that are important to you, by standing up for what you believe in, you can be part of making change.
I really loved being part of the series. It is of course a huge honor to be chosen by Chelsea Clinton to work on the series, and to be part of what we call the ‘persisterhood’ of authors who support each other and who continue to lift up these narratives about women, because historically women have been excluded from the narrative more often than they’ve been included ‘ despite the fact that women have been at the forefront of every major moment in history throughout history ‘ those stories aren’t often told.
And so it is a delight to be part of a series that’s bringing those women’s stories to the forefront for readers of all genders.
