Bright Road is a 1953 low-budget film adapted from the Christopher Award-winning short story "See How They Run" by Mary Elizabeth Vroman.

Directed by Gerald Mayer and featuring a nearly all-black cast, the film stars Dorothy Dandridge as an idealistic first-year elementary school teacher trying to communicate with a problem student.

avoids school for a time, and upon his return, he immediately starts a schoolyard fight and then isolates himself from his teacher and classmates.

As the school year ends, Miss Richards' class observes a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon, transformed into a butterfly.

Miss Richards notes that it is reborn, "just as you and I will be born again someday, and everyone we've ever known or loved," and that witnessing the butterfly's first flight represents "a wonderful promise of things to come."

[2] "See How They Run" was Mary Elizabeth Vroman's first published short story, written while she was a schoolteacher in rural Alabama.

When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased the rights to adapt the story to film, Vroman helped write the screenplay, and as a result, became the first black member of the Screen Writers Guild.

"[6] In a contemporary review, critic Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News called the film "completely out of the ordinary" and "a human interest story, humorous, touching and captivating in its approach."