Ruby Bridges Quotes

From age 7 to about 37, I had a normal life and not a very easy one.

Kids really don’t care about what their friends look like.

There are all kinds of monuments to adults – usually dead and usually white. But we don’t often lift up the extraordinary work of children.

We have tolerance, respect, and equality in our written laws but not in the hearts of some of our people.

It’s taken me a long time to own the early part of my life.

Now that I’m a parent, I know that my parents were incredibly brave.

I would dream that this coffin had wings, and it would fly around my bed at night, and so it was a dream that happened a lot, and that’s what frightened me.

The mission of the Ruby Bridges Foundation is to create educational opportunities like science camp that allow children from different racial, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds to build lasting relationships.

If we are about what is good today, then we that are good need to come together to fight what’s bad out there.

All of our schools should be good enough to attract a healthy racial mix, which, I believe, leads to the most effective learning for everybody.

We’d get these boxes of clothing in the mail, and my mom would say, ‘What makes you think all this is for you? You’ve got a sister right behind you.’ So then I realized, we’re all in this together. We have to help each other.

We keep racism alive. We pass it on to our children. I think that is very sad.

Once my school was integrated, and I was there with white kids and a few black kids, it really didn’t matter to us what we looked like.

If my mama said not to do something, I didn’t do it.

Schools should be diverse if we are to get past racial differences.

Our babies know nothing about hate or racism. But soon they begin to learn – and only from us.

I remember the first time seeing myself on TV, when my family was watching the documentary ‘Eyes on the Prize’ for the first time. There were pictures of people going up the school stairs, and Mom said, ‘Oh, that’s you!’ I said, ‘I can’t believe this. This is important.’