B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 , 2020
obituaries
would get,” Mrs. Bridges said. “I
remember being afraid on the
first day Ruby went to the Frantz
school, when I came home and
turned on the TV set and I realized
that, at that moment, the whole
world was watching my baby and
talking about her. At that mo-
ment, I was most afraid.”
Ruby, for her part, was not
afraid.
“Despite all those angry peo-
ple,” she said years later, accord-
ing to an account published in
The Post, “I felt protected and safe
because the federal marshals
stood by my mother and I.”
Robert Coles, a psychiatrist
who years later received the Presi-
dential Medal of Freedom for his
efforts to elucidate the effects of
poverty and racism on children,
wrote extensively about students
undergoing desegregation. One of
the children he observed was
Ruby Bridges.
Amid the fury, “her mother re-assured her, taking her to school,
telling her daily of her family’s
support,” he wrote in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1963. “She never de-
nied Ruby’s observation that
‘They don’t like me’ but told her
that her family, all of them, loved
her.
“Most important, her mother
and father are strong and affec-
tionate people, and it is this inti-
macy between basically sound
parents and children which dis-
perses the natural fears in the
young. Under such family protec-
tion hard words and scowls are
ineffective.”
Lucille Commadore was born
in Tylertown on Aug. 12, 1934. Her
parents, who were sharecroppers,
were forced from their land when
Ruby integrated her elementary
school.
“When I was a child, white and
black would pick cotton together,”
Mrs. Bridges told the Courier-
Journal of Louisville, in 2009.“The bus would come pick up the
white kids, but I couldn’t go to
school. I would watch them go
with tears in my eyes. I pr ayed if I
ever got married, I wanted my
kids to go to school.”
Ruby Bridges wrote in The Post
that the decision to enroll her in
the White school sparked dis-
agreements between her parents
that led to their separation. Abon
Bridges died in 1978.
Mrs. Bridges was predeceased
by two of her children, including a
son who was fatally shot. His
daughters, whom Ruby Bridges
helped care for, attended William
Frantz, which was badly damaged
in Hurricane Katrina. The build-
ing today is the site of a charter
school, Akili Academy, where
Room 2306 is the Ruby Bridges
Room.
Besides her six children, Mrs.
Bridges’s survivors include five
siblings and a number of grand-
children and great-grandchil-
dren.
Ruby Bridges is the author of
the newly released book-length
letter to young people, “This Is
Your Time.” She dedicated
“Through My Eyes” in part “to my
mama, truly an unsung hero, for
having the courage and faith to
take a stand — not just for her own
children but for all children.”
Barbara Henry, her teacher, is
88 years old and lives in West
Roxbury, Mass. Reached by
phone, she recalled that Mrs.
Bridg es came to school with Ruby
her first day in the classroom.
Mrs. Bridges was there to be a
comfort to her daughter, Henry
said, but “unknown to her, she
was a comfort and a support for
me as well.” She said that Mrs.
Bridges remembered her with a
Christmas card every year.
[email protected]BY EMILY LANGER“Now, Ruby,” Lucille Bridges
told her daughter on Nov. 14, 1960,
“you’re going to a new school
today, a nd you better behave.”
On that day, flanked by U.S.
marshals, 6-year-old Ruby Bridg-
es reported for first grade at W il-
liam Frantz Public School in New
Orleans, becoming one of the first
African American pupils to inte-
grate an elementary school in the
South.
Bedecked in a bow, and looking
ever so petite next to the armed
escorts who towered over her, she
inspired Norman Rockwell’s
painting “The Problem We All
Live With,” a celebrated image of
the civil rights movement pub-
lished in Look magazine in 1964.
Ruby did not know what to
make of the noisy crowd gathered
outside the school building and
surmised that perhaps she had
happened upon a Mardi Gras cel-
ebration, she told the Dallas
Morning News years later. The
onlookers, many of them parents
of White students at the school,
jeered at her. “Two, four, six, eight,
we don ’t want to integrate,” they
chanted.
But Ruby’s mother was there to
reassure her.
“Don’t pay them no attention,”
she told her. “Just pr ay for them.”
Mrs. Bridges, a mother deter-
mined to obtain for her daughter
the proper education she herself
had been denied, died Nov. 10 at
her home in New Orleans. She
was 86. Ruby Bridges, who today
is an author, speaker and civil
rights activist, confirmed the
death and said the cause was
cancer.
Mrs. Bridges, a sharecropper
who had followed her parents
onto the fields of Mississippi, re-
called that she hauled 90 pounds
of cotton the day before Ruby was
born on Sept. 8, 1954, in Tyler-
town, Miss.
Less than four months earlier,
the U.S. Supreme Court had hand-
ed down the landmark decision in
Brown v. Board of Education that
outlawed segregation in public
schools. Even after the ruling,
many schools across the South
stonewalled any movement
toward integration until federal
courts ordered them to admit
Black students.
One such school was William
Frantz in New Orleans, where the
Bridges family had moved when
Ruby was 2 in search of better
employment. “Sharecropping is
hard work,” Mrs. Bridges once
said, according to her daughter’s
1999 book “Through My Eyes.” “I
wanted a better life for Ruby.”
They lived in a rooming house,
where Ruby’s father, a service sta-
tion attendant, and her mother,
who earned money cleaning ho-
tels and making caskets, began
raising their family of eight chil-
dren. Ruby was attending a segre-
gated school when the local
school board began testing Black
kindergartners to determine who
qualified for enrollment in a
White school.
“I’ve been told that it was set up
so that kids would have a hard
time passing,” Ruby Bridges wrote
in her book. “If all the black chil-
dren had failed, the white school
board might have had a way to
keep the schools segregated for a
while longer.”
Ruby was among several Black
students who passed the test,
howeve r. Over the summer, repre-
sentatives of the NAACP visited
Ruby’s parents, imploring them to
enroll her in first grade at William
Frantz.
“Ruby was special,” Mrs. Bridg-
es said, according to her daugh-
ter’s book. “I wanted her to have a
good education so she could get a
good job when she grew up. But
Ruby’s father thought his child
shouldn’t go where she wasn’t
wanted.”
Mrs. Bridges prevailed.
She later conceded that she had
not anticipated the struggles that
awaited them.
On the first day of school, Ruby
was sequestered in the principal’s
office as White parents removed
their children from the school.
Only on her second day did she
meet her teacher, Barbara Henry,
a White educator from Boston
who agreed to take Ruby as a pupil
when local teachers would not.
In time, White students re-
turned, but not to Ruby’s room. “It
was just the two of us for the
entire year,” Ruby Bridges wrote
in an essay published in The
Washington Post in 2010, recall-
ing the woman she knew as Mrs.
Henry. “She never missed a day,
and neither did I.”
The Bridg eses lived only a few
blocks from the school, but the
morning trip there was torturous
for Ruby and her mother. One
segregationist protester wielded a
toy cof fin containing a B lack doll.
Ruby’s father lost his job when he
refused to pull his daughter from
the school, and the local grocery
store began turning away the fam-
ily’s business.
“I didn ’t know how bad thingsLUCILLE BRIDGES, 86
She stood by daughter through desegregation
STEVE UECKERT/HOUSTON CHRONICLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS; THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH, 1964, BY NORMAN ROCKWELL AS PART OF A LOOK MAGAZINE ARTICLE/NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM PERMANENT COLLECTION
Lucille Bridges poses in 2006 next to the 1964 Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With,” s howing her daughter Ruby.ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. marshals escort 6-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz
Public School in New Orleans in November 1960.in the 1980s and sentenced to 12
years in prison. Mr. Shanley’s
release in July 20 17 triggered a
firestorm of protests from some
of his alleged victims, who said he
sexually abused them as children.
The Boston Archdiocese, the
fourth-largest in the United
States with more than 1.8 million
Catholics, has called Mr. Shan-
ley’s crimes against children
“reprehensible.”
Paul Richard Shanley was born
in Boston on Jan. 25, 1931. He was
young when his father — w ho
owned a p ool hall and bowling
alley — died, according to a
Vanity Fair profile. He was men-
tored by a neighborhood priest
and trained at St. John’s Semi-
nary in Brighton, Mass.
[email protected]for decades while church super-
visors covered it up and shuffled
abusive priests from parish to
parish.
Internal church records that
were made public during the
scandal contained documents in-
dicating that Mr. Shanley had
attended a f orum with others
who later went on to form the
North American Man/Boy Love
Association, a pedophile advoca-
cy organization.
Mr. Shanl ey had been a popu-
lar priest who counseled gay and
troubled youths in the 1960s an d
1970s. The Vatican defrocked him
in 2004 after dozens of men came
forward and reported that they
had been sexually abused by him.
In 2005, he was convicted of
raping a boy at a N ewton churchBY ASSOCIATED PRESSPaul Shanley, a f ormer Catho-
lic street priest who played a
pivotal role in the sexual abuse
scandal that rocked the Archdio-
cese of Boston, has died, authori-
ties said. He was 89.
Police in Ware, a town in west-
central Massachusetts where Mr.
Shanley had been living since his
release from prison in 20 17, con-
firmed his death but did not give
a cause. WFXT-TV, Boston ’s Fox
News af filiate, said he died Oct.
28.
Mr. Shanley was a notorious
figure in the clergy sex abuse
scandal that exploded in Boston
in 2002, after the Boston Globe
revealed that dozens of priests
had molested and raped children
PAUL SHANLEY, 89
Pedophile priest was key figure in B oston Archdiocese scandal
CHITOSE SUZUKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Retired Catholic priest Paul Shanley, outside a court in Cambridge,
Mass., in 2002. Shanley was defrocked by the Vatican in 2004.DEATH NOTICELAVOHNEE CAROLYN CADE
Entered into eternal rest on Thursday,Novem-
ber 5, 2020. She is survived by her three
sons,AnthonyJ. Cade,Nathaniel Cade and
Daniel Cade; two brothers,Joseph A. Marshall
Sr.and David Marshall; 19 grandchildren; 65
great-grandchildren;ahost of other relatives
and friends.Mrs.Cade may be viewed at
Stewart Funeral Home,4001 Benning Rd., NE
on Monday,November 16 from1p.m. until
service at2p.m. Interment is private.CADEBARBARA H. DRESNER
On November 9,2020, BarbaraH.Dresner of
Washington, DC; beloved wife of the late Allan
R. Dresner;devoted mother of David (Vivian),
Thomas,Donald (Seeta) andKeith Robert Dres-
ner;sister of Elizabeth Maule; adored grand-
mother of Brian Dresner (Megan); great grand-
mother of Chloe,Isabel and Amelia. Internment
will be private in Williamsport,PA.Inlieu of
flowers,please makeadonation to Bethesda
Chevy Chase Rescue Squad
(https://www.bccrs.org/donate-2/other-dona-
tion-types/ [bccrs.org]), Defenders of Wildlife
(https://defenders.org/ [defenders.org]) or
another animal welfare charity of your choos-
ing.DRESNERLENOREW.GNATT
On Thursday,November 12,
2020, LENOREW. GNATT of
Chevy Chase,MD. Beloved
wife of the late Solomon
Gnatt. Devoted mother of
Roberta (Herschel) Gloger,
Elaine (Steven) Hercenberg
and Dr.Michael (Ruth) Gnatt. Dear grand-
mother of Erica and Miriam Gloger,Lauren
(Darren) Geisbert, David (Dani) Hercenberg,
Rachel (Joshua)Waimberg, Deborah (Ari)
Lesser,Kimberly Llewellyn, Johanna (Max
Heilveil) Owens,Emily (Will Saponaro) Gnatt
and SaraWeissel. Loving great-grandmoth-
er of Eli, Max, Charlie,Lillie,Clara, Mila,
Liam, Graham and Griffin. Funeral services
will be private.Memorial contributions may
be made toWashington Performing Arts,
http://www.washingtonperformingarts.org or to
the charity of your choice.Arrangements
entrusted toTORCHINSKY HEBREW FUNER-
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