November 14 · This Day in America
She is six years old. She wears a white dress and carries her lunch. Four U.S. marshals walk around her, two ahead and two behind, because a mob is screaming on the steps of William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans. Every white family pulls their children out. Every teacher but one refuses to teach her. So for a year Ruby Bridges learns in a classroom of one, with Barbara Henry, while the crowd outside keeps up its hate. Her father loses his job. Her grandparents are forced off their land. And every single morning, the small girl walks the same gauntlet again, and does not run. Norman Rockwell painted her later — the white dress, the marshals' legs, the slur on the wall behind her. The whole weight of a nation's promise, carried to school by a child who simply kept walking.
Source: www.womenshistory.org
Also on this day · 1889
A 25-year-old reporter for the New York World boards a steamship in New Jersey to try to beat the fictional 80-day record from a Jules Verne novel — with one dress and a small bag. She meets Verne himself in France, who tells her, "If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands." She does it in 72 days, 6 hours, and change. No one, man or woman, had ever circled the Earth so fast.
Source: guides.loc.gov
“If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands.”Jules Verne to Nellie Bly, 1889