Tuesday,January 29^th 2019

Ruby Bridges goes to school. 

In the first extract, we can see a police car parking in front of the house of a Black family. They are going to escort a little girl (Ruby Bridges) to her new school. They drive her to the school and she’s harassed by a big crowd of angry parents.

She waits all day long in front of the headmaster’s office. She doesn’t study with White pupils because the teachers don’t accept her. She is rejected, the woman call her “a jigaboo”. She is treated like a danger…

Similarities and differences between the two extracts 

In the first extract, Ruby is with her mother, she is protected by four marshalls and the crowd is close to them whereas in the second extract, Ruby is alone, surrounded by the marshalls but the crowd is separated by two fences.

Ruby looks scared/stressed/afraid/anxious in her pink dress whereas for her second day of school she has got a white dress with a white ribbon, white socks and white shoes (white is a symbol of peace, purity or innocence). She looks more confident or determined.

In the first extract, the front door is closed, the walls and the columns are clean whereas in the second extract, we can see graffiti on the white column. There is a very offensive insult “nigger” and the name of a racist cult ‘K.K.K’ (=the Ku klu Klan), we can see that someone threw a tomato on the wall, it looks like blood.