A well-known Norman Rockwell painting from the days of the civil rights movement in the South shows a black girl in a white dress. She carries schoolbooks and a ruler and is accompanied by four white men.
The scene is not fictional. The men were U.S. marshals, and the little girl was Ruby Bridges.
In 1960, when she was 6 years old, Ruby integrated Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans under a federal court order. Because of a white boycott, she was the only pupil for much of the school term.
“The Story of Ruby Bridges” (Scholastic) is a new children’s book. It was written by Dr. Robert Coles, a psychiatrist/author who teaches at Harvard University and won the Pulitzer Prize for his five-volume “Children of Crisis.”
Ruby Bridges changed his life. In 1960, he was a 31-year-old physician who had spent two years in the Air Force in Biloxi, Miss., and was eager to return to his native Boston and get on with his career in psychoanalytic child psychiatry.
He first took a detour to New Orleans because he was curious about how the threats and violence of the civil rights movement were affecting black children’s emotional health.
As it happened, he was driving by Frantz School one morning as Ruby and her bodyguards made their way through the screaming mob. He was galvanized by her “stoic dignity,” resolving to interview her parents, the school’s teachers and, of course, Ruby. Which he did.
He learned that her father and mother were the children of sharecroppers and did not read or write. Her father had picked crops on a Mississippi farm, but was displaced by mechanized harvesters when Ruby was 4, which forced a move to New Orleans. Her father became a janitor there; her mother scrubbed floors at night in a bank. Ruby had a younger brother and sister.
Every Sunday, the family went to church. The parents told Coles their Christian faith sustained them through the turmoil. Both received death threats; her father lost his job.
Her teachers marveled at how well Ruby held up under the pressure. Coles would write: “I reassured those teachers, I regret to say, with the notion that all was not as it seemed. Ruby appeared strong, but she would, soon enough, show signs of psychological wear and tear. She was probably in `denial,’ hiding behind `defense mechanisms.’ “
One day, a teacher told of standing at a classroom window and watching Ruby and the marshals approach the school. After a woman spat at the girl and a man shook a fist, she had paused at the entrance and smiled at both, and then her lips had moved.
The teacher wondered what Ruby had said to the crowd. A marshal said Ruby had told him she had said a prayer for the people who were yelling at her. She said she also prayed for them each night before bed.
Coles asked Ruby why. She said she had learned at church and at home that when Jesus was on the cross, he had asked God to forgive those who taunted him and called for his crucifixion. She was following Christ’s example.
Ruby said: “The minister said God is watching, and he won’t forget because he never does. The minister says if I forgive the people and smile at them and pray for them, then God will keep a good eye on everything and he’ll be our protection.”
Her words are from Coles’ “The Moral Life of Children” (Atlantic Monthly Press; paperback, Houghton Mifflin), which is the subject of a TV documentary that airs at 10 p.m. Friday on WTTW-Ch. 11.
Coles writes: “I asked her if she believed the minister was on the right track. `Oh, yes,’ she said; and then came a kind explanation for the benighted, agnostic Yankee visitor: `I’m sure God knows what’s happening. He’s got a lot to worry about; but there is bad trouble here, and he can’t help but notice.’ “
Today, Ruby Bridges Hall, who married a lawyer and became a successful businesswoman, is the mother of four sons; she also is raising the four daughters of her brother, who was murdered two years ago.
Coles has maintained ties through the years with Hall, whom he calls his touchstone. This month, she and Coles appeared together in public for the first time at Connecticut College to receive honorary degrees.
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Because of Ruby the child, Coles decided to be a psychiatric “field worker,” involving himself first with children in the desegregation battles and later with those buffeted by other upheavals throughout the world.
When it came to understanding the importance of children’s spiritual and moral beliefs, however, he was a slow learner.
He credits his wife, Jane Hallowell Coles, a high school teacher, for helping to open his eyes. He writes that she had always been interested in her students’ “values and ideals; their sense of what is right and wrong, and how they state their reasons; and not least, the moral statements they make in response to what she teaches.”
For too long, he concedes, he was dismissive and sometimes cynical when children talked about God or about their views of right and wrong, trying to fit everything into the psychological theories he had learned and ignoring the signals they were sending about their inner lives.
When children displayed anxiety or sadness or fear, he was fine; he knew what to do. But when they were bearing up well, he was befuddled.
Ruby’s reliance on religion, he concluded, was a case of her blindly obeying what she had been told, “a poor black child in an extremely hostile Southern neighborhood, grasping at whatever straws came her way.”
Jane Coles urged him to look deeper. She was struck by the moral conflict she detected in an 8-year-old white girl who was among the first whites to return to Frantz School.
The girl told how her mother had used a racial slur, then had apologized: “She told us she was sure glad we’re back in school, and it didn’t make any difference if there were a few colored kids there, because they’re going to need an education, just like us, and God put them there, just like he did us. And even if it’s not the right thing to mix people up, just because some federal judge says to do it, there’s no reason we should all end up losing out on our schooling for the rest of our lives.”
Coles began to recognize that the white redneck children also were engaged in a moral struggle, sorting through the moral messages they received to decide which they should embrace.
After “Children of Crisis,” Coles would return to his research, finding the material for “The Moral Life of Children” and “The Spiritual Life of Children.”
In the former, there’s this from Ruby at age 10 on her experience at Frantz: “I knew I was just Ruby, just Ruby trying to go to school, and worrying that I couldn’t be helping my momma with the kids younger than me, like I did on the weekends and in the summer.
“But I also guess I knew I was the Ruby who had to do it-go into that school and stay there, no matter what those people said, standing outside.
“And besides, the minister reminded me that God chooses us to do his will, and so I had to be his Ruby, if that’s what he wanted.
“And then that white lady wrote and told me she was going to stop shouting at me, because she’d decided I wasn’t bad, even if integration was bad; then my momma said I’d become `her Ruby,’ that lady’s, just like she said in her letter, and I was glad.
“And I was glad I got all the nice letters from people who said I was standing up for them, and I was walking for them, and they were thinking of me, and they were with me, and I was their Ruby, too, they said.”
Coles writes of the courageous black children in the South like Ruby, and of “the white children, too, who braved awful criticism to befriend them.”
He asks: “Whence that moral capacity, that moral spirit, that moral leadership? How are we to make sense of such moral behavior in psychodynamic terms?
“More broadly, what makes for a moral life-as opposed to moral reflection and analysis and argument?”
Then there’s the reflections of Ruby’s mother on people “who talk about doing good” and those “who argue what’s good and what’s not good” and those “who always worry about whether they’re doing right or doing wrong.”
She prefers the folks who “just put their lives on the line for what’s right, and they may not be the ones who talk a lot or argue a lot or worry a lot; they just do a lot!’ “
She just described her family.