...During this crisis, Ruby Bridges became the focus of public attention. Every day she walked a gauntlet of vitriolic hatred. Outwardly, she appeared to handle the stress well. She remained attentive, good-natured, and stoic throughout the crisis. Her mother and father argued about continuing to send her to school, but eventually agreed that Bridges had become a role model for other children in the South.
On November 14 and for the rest of the school year, Bridges required the assistance of federal marshals who escorted her to and from school. A psychiatrist, Robert Coles, was also hired to counsel Bridges through the trauma. After one protestor threatened to poison her food, Bridges stopped eating the lunches her mother prepared for her. Her persistence was immortalized by Norman Rockwell in painting, “The Problem We All Live With.” As white parents continued their boycott, Bridges was the only student in attendance at the school between January and May 1961. Tate, Preevost, and Etienne faced similar abandonment by white families at their elementary school. Despite the crisis, the process of desegregation continued the following school year. The courts told the Orleans Parish School Board in unequivocal terms that desegregation would continue. Legal challenges by the legislature and the school board continued to fail, and the federal government threatened to use force to uphold the law.
Bridges completed her elementary education in William Frantz. She later earned a graduate degree in business and worked for fifteen years in travel and tourism. Her website, rubybridges.com, chronicles her experience in retrospect. Currently, she travels the United States as a motivational speaker. In 1999, she founded the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which specializes in conflict management and diversity education. She resides in New Orleans with her husband and children.
). Despite how I've been disingenuously smeared and slandered, and had my motives and beliefs falsely decided for me in the worst possible portrayal by a group of posters here, just for questioning and showing concern over, and not agreeing in sheep-like lockstep, with some very disturbing and extreme ideals and "solutions" (the kind that only make things a Hell of a lot worse) they were advocating, I actually believe in the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Dream," just expanded for a modern range of types of people - where everyone can live in peace and harmony, without hate, segregation, and judgement by WHAT someone is, and equal opportunities for all, with neither an entrenched, establishment, nepotistic "old boy's club," handing out the benefits, for arbitrary and imbalance artificial Affirmative Action "quotas." But maybe that's naïve, because that's not what EITHER Social Conservatives NOR Social Progressives are really advocating for or pushing in the modern day and age. And thus, I am alienated from many parts of both of their social programs, and sharp, absolutist demographic thinking BOTH sides promote in their extremes (and these "extremes," are more and more being brought to the mainstream by both sides of the equation), both of which seemed designed to lead civilization to utter destruction and ruin in the long-term - but again, we're HIGHLY discouraged from thinking in the long-term nowadays.
