60+ Ruby Bridges Quotes That Will Give You Chills (And Change How You See Courage)

Ruby Bridges was six years old when she entered a school alone, behind a roaring mob & changed history. These Ruby Bridges quotes come straight from her own mouth, not a writer’s imagination. They are about racism, faith, family & hope. Read them once, and you’ll be thinking about them for weeks.

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Racism and Unlearning Hate

• “Racism is a grown-up disease, and we should stop using our kids to spread it.”
• “You cannot look at a person and judge him or her by the color of their skin.”
• “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.”
• “Evil looks like you and I. I know what evil looks like, and I know that it comes in all shades and colors.”
• “I wanted to use my experience to teach kids that racism has no place in hearts and minds.”
• “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.”
• “It’s time to get past our racial differences. We owe it to our children to help them keep their clean start.”
• “We all have a common enemy, and it is evil.”
• “I believe it doesn’t do you any good to hate.”
• “If we’re gonna get past our racial differences, it’s gonna come from our kids, but they have to be together to do that.”
• “We keep racism alive. We pass it on to our children. I think that is very sad.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Children and Innocence

• “The mission of the Ruby Bridges Foundation is to create educational opportunities like science camp that allow children from different racial, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds to build lasting relationships.”
• “If kids have the opportunity to come together to get to know one another, they can judge for themselves who they want their friends to be. All children should have that choice. We, as adults, shouldn’t make those choices for children. That’s how racism starts.”
• “Kids come into the world with clean hearts, fresh starts.”
• “None of our kids come into the world knowing anything about disliking one another.”
• “Kids really don’t care about what their friends look like.”
• “Our babies know nothing about hate or racism. But soon they begin to learn – and only from us.”
• “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.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Courage and Staying True to Herself

• “Don’t follow the path. Go where there is no path and begin the trail. When you start a new trail equipped with courage, strength and conviction, the only thing that can stop you is you!”
• “I do think that some people are born as old souls.”
• “It’s taken me a long time to own the early part of my life.”
• “I’m not a very public person.”
• “From age 7 to about 37, I had a normal life and not a very easy one.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Faith and Prayer

• “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.”
• “I believe in my prayers.”
• “I pray for my enemies, that God will forgive them.”
• “Somehow, it always worked. Kneeling at the side of my bed and talking to the Lord made everything okay.”
• “What we, as African Americans, stood on was our faith.”
• “Throughout my life, my prayers have actively sustained me – held me up, carried me through.”

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Ruby Bridges Quotes About Family and Upbringing

• “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.”
• “As African-Americans, people of that generation felt pretty much that 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.”
• “A lot of my strength came from my upbringing.”
• “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.”
• “If my mama said not to do something, I didn’t do it.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Her First Year at School

• “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.”
• “The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school’s steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn’t have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known.”
• “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.”
• “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 had never seen a white teacher before, but Mrs. Henry was the nicest teacher I ever had.”
• “I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.”
• “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.”
• “I remember turning onto the street. I saw barricades and police officers and, just, people everywhere. When I saw all of that, I immediately thought that it was Mardi Gras. I had no idea that they were here to keep me out of the school.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Education and Fair Schools

• “The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.”
• “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.”
• “It’s not who you’re going to sit beside at school that matters now: it’s what resources will your school have.”
• “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.”
• “Schools should be diverse if we are to get past racial differences.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Equality and Justice

• “We may not all be equally guilty. But we are all equally responsible for building a decent and just society.”
• “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.”
• “You cannot look at a person and tell whether they’re good or bad.”
• “We have tolerance, respect, and equality in our written laws but not in the hearts of some of our people.”
• “I think that racism is ugly and so unfair, and I believe that we all need one another.”

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Ruby Bridges Quotes About Love, Unity and Taking Care of Each Other

• “I believe that we have to come together, and we have to rely on the goodness of each other.”
• “We have to take care of each other’s children.”
• “If we are about what is good today, then we need to come together to fight what’s bad out there.”
• “We must absolutely take care of one another.”

Ruby Bridges Quotes About Legacy and Inspiring Kids Today

• “When I think about our babies today and them not being safe in school, I think that the next civil rights movement, you know, is to ban assault weapons so that our babies can be safe.”
• “Wisdom is a gift but has nothing to do with age. That was probably the case with me.”
• “I want to inspire kids.”
• “I like to share my story with children, and they are amazed by the story.”
• “That’s really what my work is all about – bringing kids together.”