The Patriot Post® · A 50-Year Anniversary

When I was a little kid, this in my single-digit years, I used to love the Saturday Evening Post when its cover would be a Norman Rockwell painting. The minute I’d see one, I race to find Elmer and Belle because I knew they loved the covers as much as I did and we’d ooh and aah over the wonderful brilliance of my favorite painter of all time.

One day, fifty years ago to be exact, there came a magazine with a particular Rockwell painting on the cover that made me cry, not because I couldn’t share it with Elmer and Belle, but because I was so ashamed, so deeply hurt. I finally I took it to Elmer because he could explain anything. I stumbled through an apology of sorts, then showed him the cover. He gently laughed and we had a long talk about good and evil.

Elmer and Belle were black, you see, and helped me learn at a very young age the color of a person’s skin has absolutely nothing to do with anything. They worked for my grandfather and they were very much part of our family. They were my best friends until they died and let’s just say the pictures of Elmer driving “the get-away car” at my wedding, and of precious Belle holding my children, are among my most treasured keepsakes.

The Rockwell painting was titled, “The Problem We all Live With” and showed a pretty, young black girl, her pressed white dress just perfect and matching the ribbons in her pigtails, being escorted to elementary school by faceless U.S. Marshals in New Orleans on Nov. 14, 1960. Yes, just last Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the day the first “colored” child attended a previously all-white school in New Orleans. That painting has made me cry ever since.

Last weekend I was in Washington, watching my son marry the most wonderful girl I could ever imagine, and on Sunday there appeared a story in the Washington Post written by that African-American girl, Ruby Bridges. I dare say the story is almost as wonderful as the struggling advances we have made in the last half of a century but the kindness and understanding Ruby displayed in writing it was much the same wisdom Elmer shared so long ago.

Ruby wrote that a huge crowd had gathered at William Frantz Elementary School that morning. She thought there was a parade, like Mardi Gras, but the Marshals told her to look straight ahead, to not dare stop, and to ignore what she certainly couldn’t help but hear.

That entire first day she sat in the principal’s office, all alone. The next day the crowd was much, much larger (now the evil people knew there was a “colored child” at William Franz) and, as parents quickly withdrew one white child after the next from the school, there was soon a streaming exodus. That day Ruby went to a classroom.

“Hi, my name is Mrs. Henry. I’m your teacher,” she heard. Of course, she and Mrs. Henry were the only ones in the room. Here’s how Ruby remembered it in her story about yesterday’s anniversary:

“I looked up at her. She was white. Until that day I had never seen a white teacher. She looked exactly like the people who were gathered in that angry crowd.

"But she told me to take a seat, and she began to teach me. Though she looked like the people outside, she was nothing like them. She became like a best friend, or like another mother to me. We did more than just study; we played games, did art projects, learned music,” Ruby recalled in her article.

“It was just the two of us for the entire year. She never missed a day, and neither did I. I learned many things from Barbara Henry that year, but the primary lesson was the same one that Martin Luther King tried to teach all of us: Never judge people by the color of their skin.”

That’s what it was like 50 years ago. Since then, many wonderful things have happened. There was a little 5-year-old white girl, Pam Foreman Testroet, who finally joined Ruby in a classroom, giving her a playmate but, more importantly, breaking the boycott at William Franz Elementary. Hundreds of kids soon returned, too.

Some years later, at the behest of my grandfather, I drove Elmer to Newton Chevrolet and we bought him his first new car. We had us a good cry then, and when his beloved Belle died we cried again together, just as we shared our constant laughter through thick and thin for so many years.

Elmer and Belle never had children, so ours were theirs, and when Andrew and Natalie were married on Saturday, how I wished Elmer could have been laughing at the wheel as they sped away. I also wish Elmer was here right now so I could tell him the girl with white ribbons in her pigtails, the girl in the Rockwell painting, has recently led the amazing rescue of William Franz Elementary School.

Yes, after being ravaged by Hurricane Katrina there was a big move to have it torn down but Ruby is in the process of restoring it, making it a charter school, where little kids both black and white will learn that racism is very much an adult disease and that our children should be taught, in a gentle and understanding way, they should never again be used to spread it.

I just love that and, thanks to Ruby Bridges herself, I’ll now never again cry when I see Norman Rockwell’s beautiful picture of her.