Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges stopped by the Today show to talk about her new children’s book, Dear Ruby, Hear Our Hearts.
Bridges’ book, illustrated by John Jay Cabuay and published earlier this month by Orchard/Scholastic, collects her responses to letters from children who have written to her, inspired by her long career in civil rights activism. Bridges was 6 when she became the first Black student at a New Orleans elementary school in 1960; her walk to the school, escorted by law enforcement officers, was depicted in Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting The Problem We All Live With.
Asked about the inspiration for her new book, Bridges said, “It started because I’d been traveling for 25 years, visiting schools and talking to kids, sharing my own story with them. I started to get all this fan mail.…A lot of the letters were asking about my own experience, what that was like at 6 years old. I think they put themselves in the shoes of this little girl that they saw in the Norman Rockwell painting, and they wanted to know what that was like.”
She said it was important to her to include her responses to the letters she had received.
“I wanted them to be heard and to know they were being heard,” she said. “I remember speaking to a group of kids, and a little boy raised his hand and said, ‘How does it feel to be heard?’And I thought that was really powerful. It made me think about the times that I grew up in, and pretty much, you could not even be in the same room with adults if they were having grown-up conversations.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
