By Robert Coles
The true story of six-year-old Ruby, the first Black child to walk into an all-white New Orleans school, past a crowd that screamed at her every single morning.
In 1960, a court orders that Ruby Bridges, six years old, will be the first Black child at William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans. So every morning federal marshals walk her to school through a crowd of white grown-ups shouting and threatening her. White families pull their children out, so for a whole year Ruby sits in a classroom of one with her teacher, Mrs. Henry. And every day, walking past the mob, Ruby stops and prays for the people yelling at her. Robert Coles, the doctor who actually met with Ruby that year, tells it plainly, and George Ford's paintings put you right on that sidewalk beside her.
It puts the movement inside one child the same age as the children reading it, which is exactly why it opens a unit so well. Nobody has to hold all of history at once here, they hold Ruby, walking to school. And it hands a class a real puzzle worth talking about: Ruby prayed for the very people shouting at her, and a room full of children will have a lot to say about why she'd do that.