The Quiet Desegregation of Alabama’s Public Schools

Editor’s Note: This is the third story in The Firsts, a five-part series about the children who desegregated America’s schools.

Everyone seems to make the same mistake. They look at the picture of him, Sonnie Hereford IV, and think they know the story. In the photo, he is 6 years old. He is holding his father’s hand, walking down Governors Drive on September 3, 1963. People see him and see a boy on his way to desegregate Alabama’s schools, to become the first Black kid in attendance at Huntsville’s public, all-white Fifth Avenue School.

But that’s not what the photo shows. Now, more than 50 years later, he motions to me and then points to his head in the photo. It’s slightly bent down. He wasn’t on his way to school when that photo was taken, despite what newspaper captions would say in the days and weeks and months to follow. He had been turned away. The photo shows him going home.

It should have been certain that Hereford would enroll at Fifth Avenue. The school was just a few hundred yards away from his family’s home, and , the landmark case that outlawed the doctrine of “separate but equal,” had been federal law for nearly a decade. Still, Fifth Avenue had remained an all-white school