Feb 6, 2026

As a 15-year-old, Dorothy Counts endured days of ridicule, shunning and concern for her family so she could desegregate Charlotte’s Harding High School in September 1957. That act did not spring out of nothing. It followed legal preparations. And it stood on the firm foundation of the African-American community’s determination to seek justice and equity not in some far-off place, but right at home.

In the above excerpt from an interview conducted by Ché Abdullah, Dorothy Counts Scoggins speaks of the segregated West Side that she and her peers attended, and how those schools and the principals and teachers and parents committed to them form an important part of the West Side’s history.