Civil rights activist Ruby Bridges speaks in Spartanburg at the MLK event

Spartanburg, SC (Fox Carolina) – Ruby Bridges, a civil rights activist, will speak at the annual MLK community celebration in Spartanburg.

Bridges was the first black student to integrate an all-white elementary school in Louisiana alone at the age of six. Her walk to the front door of William Frantz Elementary School was memorialized in Norman Rockwell’s painting The problem we all live within Robert Coles’ book The Story of Ruby Bridgesand in the Disney film Ruby Bridges.

Bridges later founded the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which provides leadership training programs that inspire youth and community leaders to harness and value the wealth of diversity.

She is a published author of works including, Through my eyesPresent This is your timePresent I’m Ruby Bridges And Dear Ruby, hear our hearts.

She has won the NAACP Martin Luther King Award and the Presidential Citizen’s Medal and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame last year.

Bridges will speak at the MLK Community Celebration on Sunday at 3 p.m. in the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium.

The event is not ticketed and doors open at 1:30 p.m

In other news: Upstate events to celebrate life, legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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