Teaching moment for today: "Racism is a grown-up disease, and we must stop using our children to spread it." --Ruby Bridges
In 1960, the then unwitting six-year-old Ruby Bridges was thrust into the international limelight when she was the first African American to integrate a public school in New Orleans -- an experience that prompted her to become a Civil Rights activist, a role she continues to today.
Her story is being staged at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in playwright Christina Ham's Ruby: the Story of Ruby Bridges, a one-hour re-telling of those early days of the Cicil Rights Movement in which Ruby -- bewildered by the attention she received and the import of her celebrity -- comes to grips with the significance of her actions.
Narrated and performed by Younger Ruby [Camryn Dillard] and Older Ruby [Faith Gatson], who offer differing perspectives on these events, they are complemented by Ruby's mother Lucille [Lasherekia Hampton], whose faith in God gives her the stamina to continue to support and guide her daughter through the labyrinth of racial onslaught, while holding her family together when they are impacted by Ruby's admittance into a white school.
Taunted incessantly, and famously escorted by U. S. Marshalls every day for a year, she doesn't understand the vicious slurs, and is emotionally shattered when she realizes that it is all because of the color of her skin. -- All she wanted was to learn, and to play jacks and jump rope with her white peers in a new school.
Mrs. Barbara Henry [Adrian Lee Borden] is the only white teacher who agreed to teach the child, at first in an isolated classroom with no opportunity to mix with white children, and it is she who provides compassionate care of her young charge and offers guidance when she tells Ruby that "it takes time to heal a lot of things" and that "differences make us unique but not better or worse than others."
Director Sarah Walker Thornton guides her principal actors and a large ensemble of Montgomery school students through Ms. Ham's episodic script that is infused with a lot of singing and dancing, exhibiting the strong singing voices of the principals [the Musical Director is Darrian Stovall] and the dexterity of their dancing choreographed by Lindsay Renea Benton. -- This is a talented group whose words are sometimes obscured by their energetic stage movement, screaming epithets, and loud musical accompaniment.
Regardless, the messages of Ruby come through loud and clear for today's youth and adults. Though laws initiated integrated schools, and the play ends on a hopeful note, it is still abundantly clear that too many among us hold on to their prejudices against "otherness" of any sort, and spew racial hatred that teaches young Americans that these beliefs and behaviors are acceptable.
Ms. Ham's main teaching moment is to pay attention, and teach our children that such behavior is intolerable.
