Through My Eyes

“At the time, I knew little about the racial fears and hatred in Louisiana, where I was growing up. Young children never know about racism at the start. It’s we adults who teach it.”

This statement is one of the first sentences in the book and establishes a key framework of the autobiography. Ruby Bridges experienced racism as a young child, but she did not understand the larger context of it. Bridges talks about several other young children in the book, both Black and white. She also describes illuminating moments that scared them or helped them realize what fueled racist hatred in their community. Those realizations came from the actions of adults.

“My father’s parents were sharecroppers who worked the land under the broiling Mississippi sun. Sharecroppers didn’t own the land they farmed. They paid rent to the landowner in whatever crops they raised and struggled to survive on what was left.”

This family background is important because it was common for Southern Black families in the early-20th century. Sharecropping in many places replaced plantation slavery after the Civil War and persisted for a century. Formerly enslaved African Americans knew how to grow and harvest crops and could not easily access education or training for new jobs, nor could they buy land (they had not collected wages), so they were commonly forced into sharecropping that provided land but required farmers to share their crop yield with a landowner in order to pay rent. In effect, sharecropping set up a system of debt peonage. The rent payments constituted most of the crop yield on many farms. As Bridges notes here, it was a struggle to feed and support a family that relied on sharecropping.