Through My Eyes

Bridges observed that as demographics shifted within the city’s geography, William Frantz became both majority-Black and severely underfunded by the 1990s. She says that “the kids are being segregated all over again” (58).

This shift is the consequence of racism within the American legal system even after the legislation of the Civil Rights Movement that was supposed to create equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of race. As suburbs emerged and grew in the late-20th century, white families routinely relocated out of city centers to live in them. African Americans and other people of color, often barred from home ownership or lacking the resources to buy suburban homes, stayed in large numbers in city centers (See Contextual Analysis for more detail on this history). With the wealthiest families leaving the city and their taxes being used by the state to fund new suburban schools, inner-city schools began to lack funds and wealthy benefactors.

The legislation that emerged from the Civil Rights Movement, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, addressed blatant inequality in American society, set very important legal precedents, and offered new protections to millions of Americans. They did not, however, entirely alter society or terminate racism in the hearts and minds of many white Americans. Bridges’s story illustrates this reality. There was no apology from her white neighbors, nor an eventual kind embrace of Black residents in the city by its fellow white residents. Protests fizzled out over the school year because federal courts forced the city’s school board to continually comply with integration, and angry white citizens had no power to reverse the decisions of these federal judges. White parents who believed in segregation might have been required to send their children to integrated schools, but they were not required to invite Black people into their homes or denounce their racist thinking. The nation’s explicit and systemic racism is why Bridges’s social activism persists. Her brother’s death prioritized Bridges’s focus on a lack of resources and political will to prioritize Black spaces.

The book mentions Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a few times and his efforts as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Before King was assassinated, he began organizing the Poor People’s Campaign to mobilize impoverished Americans—many of whom were Black—to demand jobs, fair wages, workplace protections, better education, and other forms of economic justice the way African Americans demanded justice on the grounds of race. The effort yielded some local results, but both King’s and the sympathetic politician Robert Kennedy’s assassination stuttered its momentum. The cause-and-effect relationship between racism and poverty never became as widely acknowledged or understood as other consequences of racism, like subpar schools or the injustice of segregation in public institutions more generally. The Ruby Bridges Foundation continues the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement by seeking to provide underserved public-school students with opportunities that will lead to better education and more financial, social, and cultural opportunities. School integration was a piece of the larger struggle for true equality for all United States citizens.