Children on the Front Line: Ruby Bridges and the Boys Who Were Not Protected

Childhood and the Color Line

The Jim Crow order rarely spared Black children. Three November dates from the Equal Justice Initiative's calendar show how young people were targeted by mob violence, and how one six-year-old girl walked through a mob and changed a city.

Preston "John" Porter Jr., Limon, Colorado, 1900

On November 16, 1900, a Black teenager named Preston Porter Jr. was burned alive near Limon, Colorado, before a crowd of hundreds. He had been accused of murdering a white girl. Under coercion, he confessed; there was no trial. The lynching shows that racial terror was not only a Southern phenomenon. It traveled west with the railroads.

Ernest Collins and Benny Mitchell, Colorado County, Texas, 1935

On November 12, 1935, a mob took two Black teenagers, Ernest Collins, 15, and Benny Mitchell, 16, from law officers near Columbus, Texas, and hanged them. The boys had been accused of killing a young white woman. They were too young under Texas law to face the death penalty, a fact that the mob treated as a reason to act. No one was ever prosecuted.

Ruby Bridges, New Orleans, 1960

On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, escorted by four federal marshals. White parents pulled their children out. Crowds screamed at her daily; one woman displayed a Black doll in a coffin. Ruby spent the year as the only student in her class, taught by Barbara Henry, a white teacher from Boston. Her father lost his job; her grandparents were evicted from their farm. She came back every day.

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The boys in Texas and Colorado were treated as threats to be destroyed. Ruby Bridges was protected only because federal power was finally placed between a Black child and a mob. Today, as debates rage over what children may learn about this history, these stories ask a simple question: whose children does the nation protect?