Student harassed by white students from Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina - mashable

On Sept. 4, 1957, 15-year-old Dorothy Counts arrived for her first day of classes at Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina.

She was met by hostile crowds of students and adult members of the local White Citizen Council who taunted her, spit on her and pelted her with sticks and pebbles.

Counts was the first African-American student to enroll at Harding, nearly three years after the Supreme Court ruled public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

In her first week at Harding, she was harassed constantly and ignored by her teachers. Students spat in her food, threw erasers at her, and smashed the rear window of her family’s car. The few students she managed to befriend were also quickly targeted.

Sept. 4, 1957: Counts is escorted from school, followed by a crowd of 100 jeering students.

"My father was giving me a warning and was saying to me, ‘Remember all the things you’ve been taught. Hold your head up high. You’re not less than anyone else’…. I felt I had all that in me when I went there, knowing that, yes, this is right. I’m doing the right thing. - DOROTHY COUNTS"

Police told Counts' parents that they could not guarantee her safety. Her family decided to pull her out of Harding after just four days.

As a picture by Charlotte News photographer Douglas Martin of Counts impassively enduring the taunts of a racist crowd became famous worldwide (eventually winning the World Press Photo of the Year), Counts and her family moved to Philadelphia, where the teenager finished her high school education at an integrated school.

She returned to Charlotte, earned a degree from Johnson C. Smith University, and embarked on a career as a preschool teacher and education advocate.

Sept. 15, 1957: Counts is interviewed by a reporter after pulling out of Harding High School.

Sept. 12, 1957: Counts and her father, Rev. H.L. Counts, are interviewed at home after her withdrawal from Harding High School.

In 1971, Charlotte was again placed at the center of the desegregation fight as the Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that busing students was an appropriate way to integrate schools in segregated neighborhoods.

Busing, while an extremely contentious program (most famously in Boston), helped raise levels of integration at schools throughout the south.

With the lifting of federal court sanctions in the 1980s, however, school segregation began to creep back into practice.

Today, many Charlotte schools have regressed to high levels of racial and socioeconomic segregation. Affluent, largely white neighborhoods enjoy well-funded schools while schools in lower-income neighborhoods are overcrowded and starved for resources.

Now retired, Dorothy Counts-Scoggins remains active in the fight against segregation, visiting students, parents and school board officials in the Charlotte area and arguing for the necessity of an integrated and diverse education as only she can.

Source: mashable