Through My Eyes

Nonfiction | Biography | Middle Grade | Published in 1999

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-14

Chapters 15-18

Chapters 19-23

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 3-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “One Year in an All-Black School”

Before she integrated a previously all-white school, Ruby attended a different, all-Black school for kindergarten. She notes that her first school was not only segregated but also far away from her home. She walked to school with the neighborhood children she had played with before they reached school age. She reflects, “I loved school that year” (10). She had Black teachers who encouraged their students.

Late in the school year, the children at her school were asked to take a special test offered by the city school board. The purpose of the test was to “find out which children should be sent to the white schools” in the first cohort of first graders tasked with integration (10-11). She explains that the city’s plan was to start desegregation just in the first grade and proceed each year by integrating each incoming first grade class thereafter.

Bridges recalls taking the bus uptown to take the test “with about a hundred other black kids,” though she does not recall the test’s contents (11). She says that she has since learned that the test was difficult and probably “set up so that kids would have a hard time passing” (11) but Bridges passed along with just a few others. Representatives came to the Bridges house from the NAACP. The acronym stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and while the phraseology within the organization’s name is out of date, the NAACP maintains its historical title and goes simply by the NAACP. Ruby says the NAACP pressured the family to enroll their daughter in a white elementary school and be a part of the integration effort (12). She notes that her father did not want her to attend a new school, but her mother, wishing to provide the best opportunities for her children, convinced her husband that Ruby should transfer to William Frantz Public School.

Chapter 4 Summary: “My Mother Breaks the News”

Bridges moves on to the next school year, noting that the state was still in a legal battle over desegregation, with white segregationists aiming to slow down and derail the process. She starts first grade back at her old school while state lawmakers halted integration. She explains that the state legislature “passed twenty-eight new anti-integration laws” before the school year with support from the state governor, Jimmie H. Davis (13). At the federal level, judges managed to overturn these racist state-level laws. Bridges credits Federal District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright with blocking segregationists and pushing through integration. The new deadline for Bridges’s transfer became November 14, and the city erupted into violence. The federal government sent federal marshals to New Orleans for the first graders’ protection.

Bridges was one of four Black first-graders to transfer to white elementary schools. Three other girls were to attend McDonogh, another elementary school, together and Bridges went to William Frantz alone. Her mother “hinted there could be something unusual” about her first trip to the new school, that crowds might be gathered, and that Mrs. Bridges would accompany her daughter through them (14). Bridges reflects, “All I remember thinking […] was that I wouldn’t be going to school with my friends anymore, and I wasn’t happy about that” (14).

Chapter 5 Summary: “November 14, 1960”

US federal marshals arrived at the Bridges house on the morning of November 14 to escort Ruby and her mother to the new elementary school, which was much closer to their home than Bridges’s previous school. She recalls that she didn’t “remember feeling frightened,” although she learned later that the marshals were armed (15).

Seeing the school for the first time reminded Bridges of Mardi Gras because there was a big, large crowd, policemen, and barricades. The federal marshals surrounded Bridges and her mother as they walked from the car through the school’s entrance, and their size and bulk prevented Ruby from seeing the faces in the crowd. She does remember, however, people throwing things and shouting.

She was impressed by the school from the outside, noting that “it looked bigger and nicer than [her] old school” (16). She says, “The policemen at the door and the crowd behind us made me think this was an important place” (16). She did not realize on her first day that the crowd was assembled because of her and that the noise and commotion was violent.

Chapter 6 Summary: “The First Day at William Frantz”

The federal marshals ushered Bridges and her mother into the principal’s office, where they ended up spending the entire day. From there, they could see angry parents entering and leaving the office. Most pulled their children out of school. Bridges did not understand the commotion. She says, “All I saw was confusion. I told myself that this must be the way it is in a big school” (18).

There was no learning on Bridges’s first school day. She remembers being glad she could leave at three o’clock and thinking that even though she expected her new school to be hard, her day had been easy (18).

Two short excerpts from major newspapers accompany Bridges’s account in this chapter. One from the New York Times discusses “a procession of [white] mothers” that entered the school to remove their children’s belongings and boycott the school for its compliance with desegregation efforts (18). Another quote from the U.S. News & World Report adds that parents who pulled their white children from the schools “were encouraged by the State legislature, which passed a resolution calling for a boycott of mixed schools” (18).

Chapters 3-6 Analysis

Bridges has her first direct confrontations with racists opposing integration, though she does not understand these confrontations and instead is confused by the noise and activity. Her misunderstanding highlights her childhood perspective. She did not yet understand the larger context into which her experience fit.

Bridges delivers these childhood perspectives while providing bits of background that she came to realize later—like, for example, that parents were flooding the school to protest her presence among their kids. The reader therefore knows more information about the events in the narrative than the child Bridges did while they occurred.

Ruby’s first day demonstrates how contentious school desegregation was. It would not have been safe or successful to join regular classes as soon as she arrived, because there was such dangerous hatred among the white community and so much interference from parents about how the school should operate. The state legislature, too, battled desegregation. These conditions reveal how few proximate white allies there were to support integration in New Orleans. The drivers of change were away in Washington, DC. and could only send personnel to help keep the Black families integrating schools safe. Bridges admires figures like Judge Wright, who she says was “unyielding in his commitment to upholding the law of the land and in his dedication to equal opportunity for all Americans” (13). She does not openly condemn segregationists, even as she notes, for example, that Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis “threatened to close all of the public schools rather than see them integrated” (13). Bridges’s measured response to white racism remains an element of her personality throughout the book. She shows, rather than tells, the reader how abhorrent and direct racism was in the Louisiana of 1960 by recounting stories but reserving commentary on them.