 Thank you, friends. Thank you, Jack. Nice to see all of you. This poem is called Bijoux of New Orleans. Bijoux meaning something small, delicate, and exquisitely wrought. And it's a poem for Ruby Bridges on her 60th birthday on September 8th, 2014. Bijoux of New Orleans. At six, she walks past fears, sibling, hate, her shoulders high as if there might be something invisible, lifting them in her white dress with a matching bow, shoes, socks, radiant against her chocolate skin. She beams self-possession beyond her age. Every day for a year, beginning in 1960, dress-suited federal marshals with yellow-arm bands escort her to a New Orleans school where all the other parents have withdrawn their children, where she is now the lone student. They tell her not to look at anyone in the crowd around her jeering, and they lead her past a white wall splattered with hurled tomatoes. With the first grader's guileless determination, she walks America past that white wall into a penetrating look at the slur, scrawled next to her fresh-faced innocence. Cockroaches and mice come to feast on her abandoned lunches until her Boston teacher, Mrs. Barbara Henry, eats with her every day after this discovery, this hint of a silent, deeper disturbance sleeping in the basement of her courage. They learn together, care for one another all that year, even as mobs outside their school's walls shout obscenities at them. They travel from separate worlds, unite to form the unbreakable bond that comes from facing danger on a battlefield in comradeship with a fellow human. These two black and white facets of reality's diamond cut through the steel bars of an imprisoning culture. This child is immortalized with startling tenderness in Norman Rockwell's painting that President Obama hangs on a wall inside the west wing of the White House. The problem we all live with, Rockwell called it when he offered it as the cover of a 1963 Look magazine. It is 50 years later when the first African American president greets this woman who entering her seventh year of life helped cut away briars of hate, clear the trail he took to the oval office. The mythology of heaven is festooned with gold streets and shiny pearl white gates, while here on blue green earth we're blessed with incandescent arc-like visions of tiny, sturdy ruby bridges.