Through My Eyes

Through My Eyes is the autobiography of Ruby Bridges. In 1960, Bridges became the first African American child to integrate an elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana following a court mandate for the state to desegregate its public school system. Louisiana trailed segregation effort in neighboring states, such as the nine Black high school students known as the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.

Bridges’s autobiography, published in 1999, presents her childhood perspective of her elementary school integration. Photographs and excerpts from newspapers, magazines, and other authors who were adults in 1960 adorn the text and offer supplemental facts, figures, and perspectives. Bridges offers her adulthood reflections about the events of that tumultuous school year and its legacy in the last chapter.

The book opens by introducing background context about desegregation efforts in the South during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The Supreme Court case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka frames the story because it pertained most directly to education, the main topic of Bridges’s story.