Sixty-Three Years Later, White Mom Finally Gets 'Ruby Bridges' Banned From Elementary School

A Florida mom got a Disney movie about Ruby Bridges pulled from the curriculum

In 1960, a six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges became the first Black child to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana.

White families in the area were not happy about this. So unhappy that President Dwight Eisenhower had to assign US Marshals to get her safely to school and back. They boycotted the school at first, refusing to allow their kids to go inside, with the notable exception of five-year-old Pam Foreman, whose Methodist minister father escorted her past the protesters and into the school on the second day. Even when they finally started sending their kids back to school, Bridges still had to walk through a gauntlet of white adults threatening and screaming obscenities at her. Every day. For a year. At the age of six. Every teacher but Barbara Henry, who had been hired specifically for her previous experience teaching in integrated schools, refused to teach her. But she went back and sat alone in that classroom as Henry's only student. Every day. For a year. At the age of six.

Bridges continued at that school and other integrated schools until graduation. All those people, all those teachers, were not able to keep her out.

But one random lady from Florida has finally succeeded where all those other people failed. Emily Conklin, development director for the YMCA of Greater St. Petersburg, refused to let her daughter see the movie with the rest of her second grade class earlier this month and then issued a formal challenge to the movie, demanding that it be taken off the curriculum in the Pinellas school district because, according to the Tampa Bay Times , "the use of racial slurs and scenes of white people threatening Ruby as she entered a school might result in students learning that white people hate Black people."

Emily Conklin, via LinkedIn 

You know what also might make students learn something a little like that? Not being able to watch a movie in class because an accurate representation of a historical event might make white people look bad.

Well, the movie also features several white characters who helped Bridges, rather than scream at her that they wanted to poison her, including Dr. Robert Coles, the psychiatrist who volunteered to counsel her and support her family while they were dealing with the stress of that first year, as well as Barbara Henry, played by Penelope Ann Miller. It is based in fact and in history, and in fact and in history, there were a whole lot of white people who really hated six-year-old Ruby Bridges.

“Think about it. A six-year-old girl can go to school every day with armed guards, but second graders can’t learn about it?” wrote former St. Petersburg police chief and deputy mayor Goliath Davis in an op-ed earlier this month. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

No, it doesn't. But the idea that white children shouldn't have to learn about racism just because black children have to live with it is a popular one and has been for a long time.

Eight years after Ruby Bridges's first day at school, after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, a white Iowa teacher conducted an experiment with her third grade class in which she told the brown-eyed students they were better and smarter than the blue-eyed students, and then reversed the experiment the next day, so that students could understand how discrimination felt.

After the teacher, Jane Elliot, appeared on "The Tonight Show" to discuss the experiment with Johnny Carson, hate mail poured in, accusing Elliot of teaching "white self-contempt" and calling her experiment "Orwellian."

"How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," said one. "Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage."

Strangely, the difference between now and then is that angry white parents did not, ultimately, have the power that Emily Conklin does. Jane Elliot did that same experiment every year until she retired, despite the fact that the entire town hated her guts for doing it and for drawing that kind of attention to them. The white parents who wanted to shield their children from having to go to school with a six-year-old Black girl did not have the power to stop that. But Emily Conklin does. Because Florida.

The same thing has been going on all over the state, as a state law enacted last year allows parents to issue a challenge to any book or lesson they don't like and have that book or lesson pulled immediately from the curriculum or the entire school until a review committee can assess it. The Pinellas County School district has also pulled Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye for review, supposedly due to a two-page rape scene, all because a parent complained.

There is a reason parents have not previously been given this kind of power — because kids need to learn, teachers need to be able to feel free to teach, and if you let every parent have a say over what kids learn and teachers teach, there are going to be so many conflicting viewpoints that eventually nothing will be allowed to be taught or learned. The parents who want to keep Ruby Bridges vastly outnumber the Emily Conklins, and it's not possible to please both sides here.

Everything can't be about making parents happy. Sometimes it has to be about what is best for the children, and a movie like this is great for children to see. It is the kind of movie that will help them make good choices about what kind of people they want to be, that will show them that even kids their own age can make a difference. And that's a lot more important than how it makes Emily Conklin, a grown-ass woman, feel.

OPEN THREAD

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. Click below to tip us!