Young Ruby Bridges on School Steps

US Marshals with Young Ruby Bridges on school steps as she walks past crowds screaming vicious racial slurs at her. Ruby Bridges would become the winner of the 2016 In the Souls of the People Award and is also the only award recipient to appear in a Steinbeck work. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck described the travails of a six-year-old black girl chosen to integrate an all-white William Frantz elementary school in New Orleans in the Deep South of 1960. At the time, he did not know her name. Presented with the Steinbeck Award on February 24, 2016, the names John Steinbeck and Ruby Bridges are now linked. Bridges called racism an adult disease and asked that we stop using children to spread it. John Steinbeck couldn't have said it better.