Before the made-for-TV film Ruby Bridges made its ABC network premiere on the Sunday night of Martin Luther King weekend in 1998, a taped address from the White House set the tone.
Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, overviewed the 1954 supreme court decision that cleared a path for this six-year-old Black girl to begin integrating in New Orleans public schools in 1960, and nodded at the protests and violence Bridges and other school integration pioneers triggered nationwide. President Bill Clinton recalled his whitewashed Arkansas childhood, noting that he never went to school with a person of another race until attending college at Georgetown. “We’ve come a long way since 1954,” Clinton remarked, “but we still have a long way to go. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from Ruby Bridges is that every one of us has the power to stand up against injustice and stand up to the ideals that make America great.” But in a sign of the times, that’s no longer the prevailing mood now.
