Dorothy Counts integrated Harding High School in Charlotte, NC in 1957. The school was named for Harry Harding, the son of a Confederate army major.
Dorothy had rocks and sticks thrown at her, was spat upon, jeered, heckled, ridiculed, called racial slur, abused and harassed by white students. They spit in her lunch, causing her father to have to pick her up to feed her each day. Her parents removed her from the school after four days when racist white students busted the windows of her fatherās car.
Dorothy is alive today.
Racism is what she lived through in school. Yet we have white parents who donāt want their children to learn about what happened to her.
Why is that?
Because some of those white students are yet alive . They are grandmothers and grandfathers, aunties, and uncles, retired, cops, judges, and business owners.
White parents donāt want their white children to know what their white grandparents did to Black people. And they donāt want them to know that it wasnāt ancient history, that it happened to people who are still living and breathing today.