Through My Eyes

There has been much scholarly work intended for all audiences produced about the Civil Rights Movement, segregation, and Ruby Bridges. The following nonfiction titles supplement Bridges’s account of her own story because they are longer and incorporate a larger context. They have also been peer reviewed by professional academics to ensure accuracy.

• The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles (1995)

This book is the one to which Bridges refers in the last chapter. The author, Robert Coles, was the child psychologist with whom the author met during first grade. He wrote about children in traumatic situations in his scholarly work, but he wrote this children’s book about Bridges’s story. Bridges says that this book popularized her story in the 1990s, which helped build her platform.

• Ruby Bridges and the Desegregation of American Schools by Duchess Harris (2019)

 This book, also intended for a middle-grade audience, is an account of Ruby Bridges’s story and the larger process of desegregation with some more historical background. The author has both a PhD and a JD, advanced degrees in both an academic field and law.

• Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul (2021)

Stamped is also intended for a middle-grade audience and uses age-appropriate language while maintaining its source material. It is an adaptation of the scholarly monography Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. Both books cover a long timeline from the colonial-era enslavement of Africans in North America to the Black Lives Matter movement in the twenty-first century. Stamped contextualizes the Civil Rights Movement and some of its leading figures in a longer history of American racism and examines different historical approaches to civil rights including and beyond desegregation.

• Creating the Suburban School Advantage: Race, Localism, and Inequality in an American Metropolis by John L. Rury (2020)

This is a scholarly monograph intended for an adult audience. It would help researchers better understand the historical transformation of once-wealthy inner-city public school into underserved spaces, like William Frantz Public School. The politics and social movements that constitute that story inform the larger context of why Ruby Bridges started the Ruby Bridges Foundation. The book considers case studies from post-World War II Missouri and Kansas. Though it is not about Louisiana specifically, many Southern states shared patterns of resistance to integration, white suburban relocation, and resulting underfunding in urban schools.