Ruby Bridges'New Children's Book: This Is Your Time

This is Your Time

WITH THE RISE OF A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, RUBY BRIDGES TURNS TO AMERICA’S YOUTH

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Cover image courtesy of Random House Children’s Books.

In July of 2011, just eight months after the fiftieth anniversary of Ruby Bridges’ first day at New Orleans’ William Franz Public School, she stood in front of the famous Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With,” beside President Barack Obama, who told her: “I think it’s fair to say that if it hadn’t been for you guys, I wouldn’t be here.” The first Black child to attend an all white elementary school in the South, Bridges—who today speaks about the experience all over the country—recalls that day as shrouded by the profound innocence of childhood. At six years old, she had no idea that what she was doing would change the world.

In November of 2020, now sixty years past the day she walked into William Franz accompanied by U.S. marshals, Bridges released an appeal to the children of America in the form of her new book This Is Your Time, published by Delacorte Books for Young Readers. Rockwell’s painting, depicting Bridges at age six walking bravely with her schoolbooks against a backdrop of hatred and violence, graces the cover.

In a year marked by its new civil rights movement, Bridges’ story of bravery and disruption in the face of inequality remains as pertinent as ever. In This Is Your Time, she retells it for a new generation— one whose world, though changed, remains shaped by the same forces of inequality and unrest that placed her in the history books sixty years ago.

In interviews spanning her career as an activist, one message Bridges has proclaimed again and again is the belief she has in children. Reflecting on her own innocence in the face of so much hatred and drawing from her experiences in classrooms all across America, she has famously said that “racism is a grown-up disease”.

Written as a letter to young people, This Is Your Time proclaims:“I have not witnessed hatred or bigotry when I’ve looked into your young eyes. Regardless of what you looked like or where you came from, I saw some of my six-year-old self in you. You did not care about the color of each other’s skin, and I have loved seeing that, because I saw hope.”

On November 10, the day the book was published, Bridges announced that her mother, Lucille Bridges, had died at the age of eighty-six. She wrote: “Our nation lost a Mother of the Civil Rights Movement today. And I lost my mom.” After setting her daughter up to break down the barriers she herself had faced, Lucille Bridges has long advocated the importance of sharing one’s experiences. In a 2016 interview produced by the Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston, Texas she spoke on the value she placed on getting an education and how badly she wanted her children to have a better chance at it than she did. “And I want other people to know how hard it was,” she said. “I would love for people to just listen to my story so they can know how hard it was for my kids to go to school.”

Testifying to the obstacles to integration and to equality, as well as to the pure hatred and terror experienced throughout the process, Ruby Bridges has spent her life making sure that we don’t forget. But she has also spent her life spreading a message of love, of unity, and of hope; a message that she leaves with her readers, this next generation of change-makers: “Don’t be afraid. This is your time in history. Keep your eyes on the prize. And at all costs, stay united.”

This Is Your Time can be purchased at penguinerandomhouse.com.