On September 4, 1957, fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts from Charlotte, North Carolina, was all set for school and had prepared extensively for this day. It was her first day in school and an all-white school.
Dorothy had been admitted to Harry Harding High School, which was located in Charlotte. The school had just been desegregated after nearly three years after the Supreme Court had ruled public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. She was one of the four black students admitted to becoming the first African American to attend the recently combined all-white school.
On her first day, Counts was taken to school by her father and the company of a family friend, Edwin Thompkins. Since their vehicle was prevented from approaching the front entrance, Edwin, a family friend, then offered to walk Counts to the front of the school while her father parked adequately. Stepping out of the car, her father told her, “Hold your head high. You are inferior to no one.” She was about to end discrimination in Harding High school, and Harding High was not going to have it.
A small crowd of about 200-300 students formed in front of the school front entrance; they screamed racial names at her, mocked her, and some threw spit and paper balls in her direction. However, an unshaken Dorothy walked by boldly without retaliating.
She informed the press later on how rocks were thrown at her, with the majority landing in front of her feet and allowing her to walk past the walls the students formed in protest against a black student being admitted.
On getting to her homeroom to receive her books and schedule, Dorothy was disregarded. As the school ended, her parents asked her opinion on whether she wanted to continue at Harry Harding, where she answered affirmatively. Her reason being she wanted to befriend her classmates. However, she was ill the next day and had to be home cared for.
Dorothy returned to school on Monday, and although she met no crowd, the students expressed their anger and shock on her return and went on to provoke and spite her. She attended Harding High for four days before being changed for safety concerns.
She was constantly harassed and threatened; this made her father, Herman, move her out alongside his family from Charlotte to Pennsylvania. Here she attended a unified school in Philadelphia. Notwithstanding, Dorothy returned to Charlotte in 1961, enrolled at Johnson C. Smith University and earned her degree in 1965.
After this, she returned to Charlotte and committed to nonprofit child care services. She was awarded an honorary diploma by Harding High school in 2008.
