NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Lucille Bridges, the mother of civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, has died at the age of 86.
Lucille walked with her then-6-year-old daughter past crowds screaming racist slurs as Ruby became the first Black student at her all-white New Orleans elementary school in 1960.
Ruby Bridges said of her mother Tuesday evening, "She helped alter the course of so many lives by setting me out on my path as a six year old little girl. Our nation lost a Mother of the Civil Rights Movement today. And I lost my mom."
Ruby Bridges went on to become an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and was memorialized in a famous Norman Rockwell painting.
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