At age six, Ruby Bridges became the first Black child to integrate a previously all-white elementary school in the South, escorted daily by US Marshals past mobs of screaming white adults. The image of her walking to class — captured in Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With — became one of the canonical photographs of the civil-rights era. Bridges, now in her 70s, runs a foundation and has authored multiple children’s books about her experience.

Why it’s been targeted

In March 2023, North Shore Elementary in Pinellas County, FL pulled the 1998 Disney film Ruby Bridges from its Black History Month curriculum after a single parent, Emily Conklin, filed a formal complaint under Florida’s parental-rights statute alleging the film “might result in students learning that white people hate Black people.” Bridges’ own children’s book Ruby Bridges Goes to School and The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles have been removed in Pennsylvania (Central York) and challenged across multiple Florida districts.