Through My Eyes

Bridges continues to discuss the crowd of protestors outside of the school and segregationist sentiment throughout the city. A swarm of white city residents and media personnel were still lining the block when Ruby and her mother left the building at the end of the first day. Bridges notes groups of high school boys chanting segregationist hymns, like a perversion of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” that instead went, “Glory, glory segregation…” and one particularly terrifying sight shown beside the text in a photo from the author’s personal collection: Someone carrying a small coffin containing a Black baby doll (20-21).

The police barricaded the block on which the Bridges family lived, so Ruby still felt safe and removed from the chaos of the school block when she was at home. She continued to play outside every day after school. While her life in school had changed drastically, she still had her family and friends at home.

A note from Bridges’s first-grade teacher accompanies the narrative in this chapter. She wrote, “Leaving the school each day seemed even more frightening than arriving in the morning” (20). She also notes that even though the New Orleans police was tasked with protecting school staff, “They very much disliked being the ones to enforce