"My message is really that racism has no place in the hearts and minds of our children." ~ Ruby Bridges

By the next school year she had proven that segregation was obsolete and inhumane, and saw the return of her classmates, and the inclusion of new ones. Even when threatened with death by the peers of her society, this 6 year old girl persevered and became the driving force that successfully maintained desegregation in the south and helped to move the country forward to what we see today, and what we will see more of in the future.

Today, Ruby is still working in her community, and still making a change. In 1999, she formed the Ruby Bridges Foundation, an organization that works to popularize "the values of tolerance, respect, and appreciation of all differences", she has also written 3 books, gives speeches throughout the country, and currently has a podcast about social issues.

In 2010, 45 years after her death and 63 years after her conviction, Nova Scotia's government. posthumously awarded Desmond an apology and pardon. Despite everything Desmond had gone through, she has only begun to achieve mainstream recognition in recent years, in large part thanks to Robson's tireless efforts to tell her sister's story. Her sister often travels the world to speak about Desmond.

In 2014, Desmond was honored on a Nova Scotia holiday. That same year, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights unveiled a display dedicated to the legacy of the black rights pioneer. Last year, an outdoor theatre opened in New Glasgow bearing her name.

And then of course on November 19, 2018, Desmond became the first Canadian female to be on the 10 dollar bill.

I wanted everyone to understand the importance of knowing those who made a change in any way and learning more about what they went through for that change and how they empowered so many others.

I think it's important to know what the people who've accomplished or changed history, had to go through just because they had different colored skins. Take Viola Desmond for example, she was only 32 year old when the officers jailed her because she was sitting in an white only section at the Roseland Theater. Desmond only wanted to kill some time while her car was being fixed, she was a businesswoman on her way to Sydney to sell black hair products. But instead she spent the night in jail, the next morning they had tried to be convicted of defrauding the province of one penny, which is the taxe difference between the upstairs and downstairs ticket, which of course Desmond had offered to pay the difference. The same day, Desmond was released, badly bruised, after paying a 20$ fine and a 6$ in court costs. Desmond had tried to bring them to court but ultimately she lost. Even though she had lost, her story and her vigilant activism through the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People were important factors in the eventual abolition of the province's segregation laws in 1954. Though eventually the attention, much of it being negative became too much for her and she left to New York to start fresh. Then she passed away at the age of 50 of internal bleeding.

Lt.-Gov. Mayann Francis holds the hand of Wanda Robson, left, as the government grants a pardon to Robson's sister Viola Desmond in 2010. (The Canadian Press)