Top 44 Ruby Bridges Quotes

I think that racism is ugly and so unfair, and I believe that we all need one another.

Throughout my life, my prayers have actively sustained me – held me up, carried me through.

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

I’m the mother of four.

Somehow, it always worked. Kneeling at the side of my bed and talking to the Lord made everything okay.

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

What I do remember about first grade and that year was that it was very lonely. I didn’t have any friends, and I wasn’t allowed to go to the cafeteria or play on the playground. What bothered me most was the loneliness in school every day.

I wanted to use my experience to teach kids that racism has no place in hearts and minds.

I remember what it was like at age 6, not really understanding what was going on around me, but having all these grown-up thoughts running through my head about what I was facing, why this was happening.

Every day, I would show up, and there were no kids, just me and my teacher in my classroom. Every day, I would be escorted by marshals past a mob of people protesting and boycotting the school. This went on for a whole year.

Racism is a form of hate. We pass it on to our young people. When we do that, we are robbing children of their innocence.

If you really think about it, if we begin to teach history exactly the way that it happened – good, bad, ugly, no matter what – I believe that we’re going to find that we are closer, more connected than we are apart.

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

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.

I believe it doesn’t do yourself any good to hate.

I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Kids come into the world with clean hearts, fresh starts.

You cannot look at a person and tell whether they’re good or bad.

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.

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.

Racism is a grown-up disease, and we should stop using our kids to spread it.

I do think that some people are born as old souls.

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.

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

As African-Americans, people of that generation felt pretty much if they were going to see changes in the world, they had to make sacrifices and step up to the plate. I’m very proud that my parents happened to be people who did. They were not privileged to have a formal education.

None of our kids come into the world knowing anything about disliking one another.

We all have a common enemy, and it is evil.

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

I think racism is something that is passed on and taught to our kids, and that’s a shame.

I like to share my story with children, and they are amazed by the story.

We must absolutely take care of one another.

When I think about our babies today and them not being safe in school, I think that should be the next civil rights movement, you know, is to ban the assault weapons so that our babies can be safe.

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

My mother had taught me that the only thing you could depend on was your faith, and I had that.

I never got the chance to meet Linda Brown; there were several times we were supposed to meet or be on the same stage together, but life gets in the way, and it never happened.

My family – my mother and father had gone through such a hard time that by the time I graduated from sixth grade, they were separated.

We as African Americans knew that if we wanted to see change, we had to step up to the plate and make that change ourselves. Not everyone comes to that realization in their lives, but thank God Linda Brown’s father felt that way.

Wisdom is a gift but has nothing to do with age. That was probably the case with me.

I’ve seen schools in Detroit where the windows are broken, where there’s no heat, and children are sitting with their coats on in class in the middle of a snowstorm. I’ve also seen schools in California with Olympic-sized swimming pools and cafeterias like five-star restaurants.

I felt like there was something I needed to do – speaking to kids and sharing my story with them and helping them understand racism has no place in the minds and hearts of children.

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

Evil isn’t prejudiced. It doesn’t care what you look like; it just wants a place to rest. It’s up to you whether you give it that place.

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

My mother and our pastor always said you have to pray for your enemies and people who do you wrong, and that’s what I did.