Ruby Bridges Visits NHS —

Students Young And Old Explore Themes Of Civil Rights

By Jeff White

The silence was palpable and everyone was still in the high school’s auditorium April 5 as a symbol of America’s Civil Rights Movement spoke her message of forgiveness and healing.

Preparations for Ruby Bridges-Hall’s visit were two months in the making, and on that day classes and grade levels came together to pay a tribute through artwork, literature, and historical commemoration.

“I thought it was really great,” said senior Jessica Clark of the assembly and the projects that went along with Mrs Bridges-Hall’s visit. “I can’t remember ever being to an assembly where everyone was so quiet.”

It has been 40 years since Ruby Bridges-Hall took her first scared steps into a newly desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, becoming both the first African American child to attend that school, and a symbol of the desegregation movement across the nation. On her first day at school, she needed a US Marshall to escort her past a jeering gauntlet of protesting parents, a scene later depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting. After that troubled first day, one teacher agreed to take care of Mrs Bridges-Hall, and she joined four other white children as the only students attending that school.

Like one of the themes of Mrs Bridges-Hall’s presentation, the importance of different groups coming together, teams of high school and elementary school students paired up to prepare projects that were presented to Mrs Bridges-Hall after the assembly.

High school seniors in Allison Zmuda’s American government class teamed up with Head O’ Meadow students in Phil Cruz’s fifth grade class to prepare a visual tribute to Ruby Bridges-Hall, and an anthology of the “Milestones of Freedom,” a highlight wheel from the Civil Rights Movement.

The “Milestones of Freedom” were pasted onto multicolored poster board and displayed on the brick walls outside the high school’s auditorium. The project served as a timeline representing the important events of the Civil Rights Movements, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the message of Dr Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks’ boycott of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.

Juniors in Jeanetta Miller’s American literature class joined forces with Pat Aschauer’s fourth grade class at Head O’ Meadow to produce a book of poetry that touches upon some of the themes of the Ruby Bridges-Hall story: racism, diversity, hatred, acceptance. “It was probably the best, most beneficial, most fun project we have ever done,” Mrs Aschauer said this week.

The projects that involved Head O’ Meadow and high school students were coordinated by several visits between schools, as well as e-mail and interoffice mail.

Even Joyce Hannah’s art class got involved in the project, though she took a more realistic approach when Head O’ Meadow’s art teacher Barbara Clark offered her the assignment. Mrs Hannah reasoned that most students at Newtown High School could not relate to some of the specific events Ruby Bridges-Hall experienced growing up as an African American girl in the 1960s segregated South. However, what they could understand was what was at the heart of Mrs Bridges-Hall’s story: exclusion. “These kids know what it’s like to be excluded, teenagers more than anybody,” she explained.

So, she had her art students create projects that answered the question, “How does it feel to be excluded?” In their images, students had to show exclusion – such as isolation, ostracism, separation – in metaphorical language.

“[The projects] were a lot more profound than I expected,” said Mrs Hannah of her students’ work, all of which depicted various images, some even positive, associated with exclusion.

“Teenagers can feel pretty left out sometimes, and they need to express that,” said an art student, Megan Gagliardi, who chose to focus on a personal matter in her exclusion project. She realized that although Ruby Bridges-Hall’s story was different on many levels, similarities could still be drawn between her and teenagers living today. “Hers was a more dramatic story [involving] racism, but still the same feeling. There are just different levels of how deep it goes.”

Allison Zmuda’s class also supplied lesson plans for all students attending the assembly, so that students could familiarize themselves with Mrs Bridges-Hall’s story before hearing her speak. “[My students] provided a tremendous learning environment for 50 percent of the building, not only for themselves,” Mrs Zmuda said.

Because of space constraints, only juniors and seniors attended the assembly. Mrs Zmuda explained that that decision was made partly because the subject matter of the assembly tied in nicely to many things that juniors and seniors were learning in their history and social studies classes.

As she told the story of her days of being the only African American student in a formerly all-white school, Mrs Bridges-Hall gave sometimes chilling firsthand comments on the dangers of racism.

“The Ruby Bridges story is about racism,” she told the assembly. “It was about racism then, and you know what, it’s still here.”

She told the students that racial healing and understanding had to begin with them; racism, she said, is something that is passed from the old to the young, so it was paramount that students not let it be passed on to them.

All the many themes that Ruby Bridges-Hall addressed in her hour-long presentation culminated with a haunting analogy of a hospital waiting room that became her home for six months, as her husband recovered from being hit by a car. One night, leaving the waiting room to get a drink, she turned to see the room engulfed in the quiet of sleep, as people of all different backgrounds and races slept on each other’s shoulders and across each other’s legs. In that room, everyone was there for the same reason: a loved one was staying in the hospital. The waiting room, of course, was a metaphor for the larger waiting room of life, and Mrs Bridges-Hall explained the importance of keeping such a scene in one’s mind.

“We should never judge someone for how they look,” said Head O’ Meadow fifth grader Annie Lyon, commenting on what she got out of the project.

After the assembly, Mrs Bridges-Hall accompanied an assortment of Head O’ Meadow students, who also attended the assembly, and high school students to the lecture hall. At that point, student teams presented a tribute to Mrs Bridges-Hall, a Power Point highlight show of “The Milestones of Freedom,” and recited some of their poetry inspired by her story. Mrs Zmuda noted that the guest of honor was moved by the students’ efforts.

“She made such a sincere attempt to meet everyone in the room,” Mrs Zmuda remarked.

The students in Phil Cruz’s fifth grade class all said they found fulfillment seeing the project through from the early stages of Internet research and watching the movie The Ruby Bridges Story to when they had a chance to tell Mrs Bridges-Hall what her story meant to them.

“You got a lot more out of it,” said Mark Cinquegran of the assembly. “In the movie, it was more of an overview, but in the presentation, she did more details.”

“All the information we had learned about her, we really couldn’t believe it because it was too horrible,” commented Brian Stickles. “She lent authenticity to it.”

Both high school and elementary school students remarked that the best part of the project was getting to work with one another.

“The ideas the kids came up with were incredible, they were great,” said senior Jessica Clark.

“It was very inspiring, because you got the feeling of what it was like to be a high schooler,” said fifth grader Annie Lyon. “It was more like a friendship than a partnership.”

And Ruby Bridges-Hall, who talked of diversity and togetherness, would want it that way.