For Kids

Through My Eyes, by Ruby Bridges. (Scholastic Press, $16.95; grades 2-6.) Adults disagree about when—indeed whether—young children should be exposed to the dark side of history: slavery, religious persecution, war, nuclear proliferation, and the like. Certainly, we should do our best to protect children from the evils of the world and preserve their moment of innocence for as long as possible. But when the time comes, as it must, to answer their questions, we must choose our words carefully.

Through My Eyes —the autobiography of Ruby Bridges, an important but little- known figure in the fight for racial desegregation—is a perfect book for such a time. Though most of the defining heroes of the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, to name but a few—performed their acts of courage as consenting adults, Ruby was only a 6-year-old child when, as she writes on the opening page, "history pushed in and swept me up in a whirlwind."

Born in rural Mississippi in 1954—the same year the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the end of "separate but equal" schooling for African American children—Ruby moved with her parents to segregated New Orleans when she was 4. There she attended kindergarten at an all-black school. It was a blissful year, she remembers. But that spring, she was given a test that would change her life forever. A federal judge had ordered the local school system to integrate two public elementary schools, one grade at a time. Based on her test scores, Ruby was one of four black children selected for the job. Her parents were reluctant, but officials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pressured them, Bridges writes. In the end, her mother relented,...