RUBY BRIDGES

Kids really don't care about what their friends look like.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

A lot of my strength came from my upbringing.

I pray for my enemies, that God would forgive them.

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.

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

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.

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

We may not all be equally guilty. But we are all equally responsible for building a decent and just society.

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

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

Once my school was integrated, and I was there with white kids and a few black kids, it really didn't matter to us what we looked like.

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.

We must absolutely take care of one another.

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.

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.