Through My Eyes

Through My Eyes is a microhistory. Through an important case study, it emphasizes the importance of a larger context. The larger context to which Bridges most directly refers in her narrative is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the final chapter, she also alludes to ongoing racism and persistent legal and social issues that lead to decreased opportunity for Black Americans. To deliver a coherent narrative appropriate for a middle-grade audience and keep the story streamlined and focused, Bridges focuses most centrally on education. It is helpful, however, to understand the conditions that created segregation and fostered the level of hatred observable in the segregationists’ abusive treatment towards Bridges, other Black families, and white allies.

After the Union won the Civil War and abolished slavery, the period known as Reconstruction occurred from 1865-1877. During that time, Union troops stationed in the South forced compliance with new laws that granted African Americans citizenship and allowed them to vote and run for office. As a result, Black people made considerable gains in Southern politics and set up social systems to aid formerly enslaved people. The government did not grant reparations to help make up for the deficit of wealth those people suffered. The struggle to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War led to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, who attempted to pardon Confederate soldiers and vetoed bills that ensured basic human rights for African Americans. Southern states still led by white racists worked hard to uphold white supremacy at the state level. These efforts were successful. White supremacist groups like the KKK emerged to intimidate Black voters and threaten Black community leaders. In the 1890s, laws called “Jim Crow laws” segregated public spaces by race, legalizing discrimination. The Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow policy by determining that segregated spaces were constitutional if they were “separate but equal” in their composition. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 overturned this decision and recognized that separate spheres are inherently unequal and that Black facilities had been demonstrably underserved compared to their white counterparts.

Desegregation was a central focus of the Civil Rights Movement. Partaking in the benefits of American citizenship required access to public spaces and resources. Ruby Bridges was at the forefront of desegregation in the public school system. Other activists peaceably and forcibly desegregated lunch counters, public transportation, various organizations, and other spaces.

Rendering segregation illegal, however, did not eliminate racism in the United States. It also did not eliminate segregation in practice. Bridges addresses this concern in the final chapter of Through My Eyes when she says that William Frantz was again segregated by the 1990s, but it had become an impoverished Black school instead of a wealthy white school. The term for this type of segregation is de facto segregation. It is created from social disparities, often economic, that create demographic hegemony at the level of neighborhoods. In other words, wealthy white people tend to live in suburban clusters and have similar homes and values, and Black families lacking access to that wealth or barred from buying homes by restrictive covenants (known as redlining) live in lower-income clusters. This example is not to suggest, however, that any racial or ethnic group constitutes an economic or geographic monolith.

William Frantz school suffered by the 1990s partially because property taxes fund the public schools in local communities. This means that wealthier neighborhoods that collect more money in property taxes have more funding for public schools. Once large cities were established after the Industrial Revolution, suburban communities have since been seen as the most desirable places to live and, as a result, are home to the wealthiest residents and high property taxes. As many white families moved from the city to the suburbs across the US, they took their wealth and investments with them, leaving a lack of resources in the inner-city. Bridges reveals that her brother’s family lived in subsidized low-income housing in the public school district that includes William Frantz Public School. William Frantz’s underfunded status and her brother’s death inspired Ruby Bridges to start the Ruby Bridges Foundation. Her activism, centrally located in the realm of public education, is informed by the intersection issues.