This Is Your Time by Ruby Bridges (review)

Sixty years after she became the first Black child to integrate New Orleans public schools, author Ruby Bridges revisits her experience as a six-year-old and its implication and meaning for a new generation. With warmth and intimacy, she addresses contemporary schoolchildren who have inherited the unfinished business of the civil rights era as she retells her personal story, following each mile marker of her first-grade year with a photograph drawn from the news or her personal collection. Just beyond the halfway point of the volume, she pivots to May of 2020, when the killing of George Floyd tore open wounds and exposed how far America has failed to come since 1960. Juxtaposing pictures of water cannons and pepper spray fired respectively on 1963 and 2020 protesters and the peaceful protest tactics of 1965 and 2020, Bridges encourages children to look forward with peace, determination, and solidarity. She consistently invokes Martin Luther King, Jr., making this a useful and largely uncontroversial choice as a classroom discussion starter, though it’s more simplified and optimistic in perspective than that of many readers and their families in the heat of struggle. Bridges’ graceful, plainspoken narrative will easily reach elementary schoolers, but the intensity and violence of many photographs suggest an audience on the mature side in that category, who might make excellent use of the images as springboards to discussing their own roles in bringing about justice.