On November 14, 1960, a six-year-old named Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans escorted by U.S. marshals. She was the first Black child to enter an all-white school in the South. People threw objects at her. One woman held up a Black doll in a little wooden coffin. Many white parents kept their kids home, so Ruby spent first grade alone with her teacher, Barbara Henry, a white woman from Boston. Ruby ate her own lunch from home because of fear of poisoning, and her mother lost her job. Through all of it, Ruby never missed a day of school. Years later she said of her teacher, “She showed me her heart.”
Norman Borlaug grew up on a farm near Cresco, Iowa. In 1944 he took a job in Mexico directing a wheat research program, and he spent years in the fields crossing and testing wheat varieties. In time he developed high-yielding, short-strawed, disease-resistant wheat. Then he worked to get the new wheat planted in Mexico, India, Pakistan, and many other countries, and the harvests were huge. His work became the heart of what people call the Green Revolution. In 1970 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He called his success only a temporary win in the war against hunger, and he kept training young scientists from around the world.
In the early 1980s in Perth, Australia, a young doctor named Barry Marshall teamed up with pathologist Robin Warren, who had spotted curved bacteria in stomach biopsies. Marshall became convinced those bacteria caused stomach ulcers. Nearly everybody said that was impossible. His papers were rejected, his results were doubted, and he was told the bacteria were harmless. He couldn’t get an animal to catch the infection, so he used himself. He drank the bacteria, got sick, and a biopsy proved the infection and the damage to his stomach. Years of patient work followed, and in 1994 a major medical meeting agreed that the treatment for ulcers was getting rid of the bacteria. In 2005 he and Warren won the Nobel Prize.
In 1979 a teenager named Jadav Payeng started planting trees on barren land on Majuli, an island in the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. He just kept planting, year after year, one seedling at a time. It took close to 30 years, but the barren land became a lush forest of about 550 hectares, more than 1,300 acres. Today it shelters birds, deer, and even elephants and tigers. In 2010 he was honored as the Forest Man of India. He gives credit to the birds, cows, deer, wind, water, and elephants that helped spread the seeds, but it started with one young man and a lot of patient work.
In 1983 a 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young lined up for the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, about 875 kilometers, against some of the best ultramarathon runners in the world. He wore long pants and seemed to shuffle more than run, a style he built up running around his farm, sometimes in rubber boots because of the rain. Plenty of Australians laughed at him. The runners had an understanding that they’d sleep until dawn, but on the first night his team set the alarm wrong and Cliff woke just after 2 a.m. and kept going. He finished in 5 days, 14 hours, and 4 minutes, about 50 kilometers ahead of the next runner, and became a national folk hero.
