Willie Wyatt Jr. had dreams of being a “super-stud” athlete at Macon County High.

Richard Walker wanted to be a neurosurgeon, and he thought attending Ramsay High School in Birmingham would help him get into a good college.

Sonnie Hereford IV, a Huntsville six-year-old, wanted to be able to walk to his neighborhood school, Fifth Avenue Elementary, with his dad.

But they were Black children in Alabama who, almost a decade after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional, were still forced by local and state authorities to attend separate schools.

It took a series of court filings, marches and demonstrations leading up to the fall of 1963 for that reality to change.

“I’m continually amazed by the number of people who either feel like this part of life didn’t touch them and it really never existed, and they have no feeling for what the suffering was, or what the struggle was,” Wyatt, now 76, told AL.com in a recent interview.

This fall, AL.com is speaking to the first students who desegregated public schools on the 60th anniversary of that effort. There have been many efforts to commemorate local history in different towns. But there is no central repository for the stories of young people who, amid riots, gun threats, beatings and simple indignities, helped secure educational rights for thousands of others across all corners of the state.

“Growing up in Birmingham in the segregated south, one thing that I think many of us took from that was the desire to be successful to prove them wrong,” said Amos Townsend, one of a small but growing number of Black students to attend Ramsay High in the late 1960s.

At least two dozen Black students from across the state attempted to enroll in all-white schools in 1963. By 1970, about a third of white students attended school with Black students, according to a 2001 Harvard study.

But by the late 1990s, those numbers began to decline as white families built their own schools in the suburbs, or pushed against busing and zoning policies meant to aid integration. Many schools, in fact, have become more segregated by race in recent years, according to recent research.

About 40 Alabama school systems are still under active desegregation orders. Many of the students of the 1960s didn’t envision that reality for their state – or their communities – when they bravely broke color barriers decades ago. But as white resistance intensified in the 1960s and 70s, the limits of court ordered desegregation became much more clear.

“A lot of people don’t realize just how long it took just to barely crack the surface,” said Joseph Bagley, an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University and author of “The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice and Integrating Alabama’s Schools.”

“It took 10 more years to achieve what might be construed as actual integration, and of course when that happens, we have yet another wave of resistance, yet another wave of white flight.”

Read the stories of three students below:

Martin Luther King Jr. visited Huntsville in the spring of 1962, where he encouraged local families to get their children involved in the fight for civil rights.

A year later, Dr. Sonnie Hereford III, one of the city’s first Black doctors and a local civil rights activist, took up King’s call, and began to organize Black families to integrate the local schools.

Involving his 6-year-old son, he’d tell reporters, was a no brainer.

“I was too young to be scared,” Hereford IV said 60 years later. “I was too young to understand how the world can be.”

In March of 1963, attorneys for Hereford and three other Black students sued the school district for prolonging segregation.

In court, school officials gave four reasons why they believed Hereford wasn’t fit to attend Fifth Avenue, including that integration had “never been done before” and his enrollment “would disrupt the entire school system.”

The ruling came quickly. By August, a judge told school officials to cease segregation in local schools, and required them to submit a plan to fully desegregate the system by the end of the year.

On Sept. 3, the first day of first grade, Sonnie and his dad walked hand in hand up the steps of Fifth Avenue School, in hopes that he would get to meet his first-grade teacher. The pair were instead greeted by white parents chanting segregationist slogans.

“There was a mob out there, I guess 150, 175 parents and kids,” Hereford III told AL.com in a 2013 interview. “They called my son and me everything you can think of.”

Schools remained closed for three days that first week; meanwhile, Hereford III relayed the news to a federal judge.

On Sept. 6, a Friday, they tried again. But this time, state troopers were there to block the way.

“They were very polite but very firm,” Hereford IV said of the troopers. “They made it clear that we were not going to go into that school, but it was nothing like the scenes in Birmingham.”

Across the district, some white families also tried to defy the governor’s orders by walking into closed schools. Some succeeded, and some were turned away.

But something changed over the weekend. Hereford III suspected business leaders persuaded Wallace that defying the order could cause problems for Redstone Arsenal. By Monday, Sept. 9, the troopers disappeared.

That day, Hereford IV became the first Black student to successfully desegregate an Alabama public school. David Piggee, Veronica Pearson and John Anthony Brewton also successfully attended classes later that day.

The next day, on Sept. 10, President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and instructed the Secretary of Defense to use any of the nation’s armed forces to enforce school desegregation in Alabama.

“That was part of the intent was to make change,” Hereford said of his and his father’s determination to integrate his school. “It was about making the statement that we’re tired of this, we’re tired of being treated like second or third class citizens.”

In Birmingham: ‘A matter of time’

Richard Walker was a sophomore in high school when he moved to Birmingham from Washington, D.C. He attended Ullman High, an all-Black public school, until his senior year.

He was used to living in a segregated world, he said, but divisions were more obvious in Alabama.

Throughout the summer of 1963, children and teens in Birmingham became increasingly involved in local demonstrations. Police unleashed dogs and firehoses on young marchers and sent many to jail.

“People in communities all over the South who felt they could flout integration will now see the futility of massive resistance,” Martin Luther King Jr. said as the Birmingham campaign continued, praising the commitment of young protesters.

Some protesters were Walker’s classmates, who fought with a level of “emotional fortitude” that Walker struggled to see in himself, he said.

So he enrolled at Ramsay High School. A white school.

“I never anticipated getting involved in the movement the way that I did, but even so I looked forward to it,” he said. “And any way that I could help, I was willing to do that.”

On Sept. 4, Walker joined four other students in an attempt to integrate three all-white Birmingham schools.

Many were met by mobs of white demonstrators, who waved Confederate flags and chanted in protest. For the second time in 15 days, Klan members bombed the home of Arthur Shores, a prominent civil rights attorney. Riots killed one and injured 21 others.

A parent told reporters years later that at least one student brought a trunk full of guns to Ramsay High School that day.

It would be a week until Walker could successfully enroll.

“Being a 16-year-old person, just thinking about it, it didn’t bother me at all,” he said. “I knew it was just a matter of time before I could go to school.”

On Sept. 10 and for much of the school year, members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference escorted Walker to and from the school. Guardsmen and plainclothes officers patrolled the school and the surrounding all-white Five Points neighborhood. Fury about school integration prompted the deadly bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church.

It was the potential for violence outside the school, Walker said, that worried him the most. But inside, he refused to let others make him feel unsafe.

For his safety, officials advised him not to go to the bathroom alone. He did anyway.

When students threw spitballs at him, he gave them a firm warning: “If there’s going to be a problem, I’ll catch you in Five Points South,” he’d say.

He wasn’t fazed either, after President Kennedy’s assassination, when a student drew a bull’s eye on the president’s portrait and wrote, “You’re next.”

“I wasn’t physically afraid of coming here to school at all,” Walker said. “The only thing I was concerned about was what grade I would make.”

In Tuskegee: ‘It was lonely’

Halfway through his first day of school on Sept. 10, 1963, at Tuskegee High, Wyatt realized his dreams of being a star athlete were gone. There would be no students left to form a team.

“Unbeknowningly to me there was a plan afoot by the whites in town that once the Black kids came in, if they were allowed in, they would withdraw their kids.”

Around lunchtime, most of the white students were getting picked up. By the end of the second or third day, all the white students had transferred to Macon Academy, a private school in the county, Wyatt said.

Up until winter break, Wyatt and 11 of his peers attended classes – usually alone – at Macon County High. There were no school lunches, no school functions and no athletics events.

“In retrospect, since we didn’t have to deal with any hostility every day from other students, it was probably the best world,” Wyatt said. “But it was lonely.”

In December, the state superintendent ordered the school to close due to its low capacity. Wyatt and his peers split up and were sent to Notasulga and Shorter high schools.

There, things only got more difficult.

On the first day of school at Notasulga that January, Mayor James Rea was there waiting at the door to block the six students from entry.

Rea told the students that they were forbidden to come to school because they would create a fire hazard. Shortly after his announcement, state troopers began to assault a photographer who had boarded the students’ school bus, Wyatt recalled.

Wyatt got hit by some shards of the plastic camera, but was more disturbed at the scene behind him. Troopers dragged the man off the bus, where some community members “took their liberties” with him as well, Wyatt recalled.

“It was the first time I had really heard a grown man moan and cry and beg and plead,” he said.

A few days and a new court order later, the students were back.

By this point, nearly all white students in the district had enrolled in local private schools – often called “segregation academies” for their role in aiding white flight in communities throughout the South.

Violence also persisted in the community, as whites continued to protest integration.

Midway into the spring semester, suspected arsonists burned down Notasulga High. Many suspected Klan involvement, though no one was convicted for the burning.

As officials worked to rebuild the school, the students set up in temporary classrooms cordoned off by chalkboards. All of the boys took English together, and Wyatt had a two hour study hall. Patti Jones, the junior, took all of her classes by herself. And there was no recreation, out of fear that the students would be attacked.

As graduation neared, the students were dealt another blow: The ceremony would be canceled, they were told, because of rumors of potential Klan activity.

Wyatt didn’t receive his high school diploma until 50 years later, during a commemoration in 2013. Now a retired businessman and veteran, he looks back on his high school days and says he’s proud of his efforts – but he’d never do it again.

“Now that I look back on it as a 76-year-old, knowing what the dangers were and how people respond and react and how violent people can be, I treat it like I did Vietnam,” he said. “I didn’t leave anything there, and I don’t want to go back.”

Across Alabama: ‘A long way to go’

In 1964, Wyatt and his classmate Anthony Lee enrolled at Auburn University, where they roomed next door to Harold Franklin, the first Black student to integrate the college. Lee attended all four years. Wyatt left after his first year and enrolled at Tuskegee University.

Walker followed in the footsteps of Vivian Malone and James Hood, who integrated The University of Alabama in the summer of 1963. He later went to medical school and started a practice in Birmingham.

Hereford stayed at Fifth Avenue for two years, largely without incident, before attending an integrated private school in the area.

He later became the first Black student body president of Butler High School, where he worked with his peers to rid the school of its “Rebels” mascot and other Confederate regalia.

Today, a lot has changed in the district, he said, sitting in the library of a West Huntsville school recently named for his father.

“But I know that not all things are equitable yet,” he added.

Huntsville is one of a handful of districts around the state that are actively working to end court oversight.

Officials must prove that their districts are not operating “dual systems of education” for Black and white students, and that they have made a “good faith effort” to ensure equal access to transportation, amenities and extracurriculars, fair discipline practices, and a diverse teaching staff.

But plans to achieve those goals are often time- and resource intensive. In some communities, desegregation-era concerns about the loss of Black schools and Black teachers are bubbling up again, as district leaders confront rising costs and changing demographics.

“It’s cost a lot,” said Joan Burroughs, one of the first Black educators to teach at the newly integrated Woodlawn High School in the 1970s. “It’s cost a lot culturally and socially. It’s cost a lot economically, on a lot of different levels.”

In some districts, the orders are virtually irrelevant, historians say, because few white students attend the local public schools. Places like Birmingham and Mobile shed their court orders years ago, but have long struggled to compete with wealthier suburban districts – or have seen communities splinter and shift, further dividing resources.

“If the population of neighborhoods start to resegregate, then the schools don’t have a choice but to follow that,” said Karlos Finley, president of the board of directors of the Friends of African American Heritage Trail in Mobile. “And that’s happened across the state.”

“It becomes a little more difficult to do as time goes on, thank God,” he added. “But we can’t ignore that we have to continue to work proactively to prevent those things from happening.”

As lawmakers seek to limit discussions of race in the classroom, Wyatt and his peers believe it’s becoming more and more important to tell the truth about issues that have long shaped the state’s education and social systems.

“It’s part of our history, so let’s not try to bury it,” Wyatt said.” We need to teach our history as it really is and understand that we’ve come a long way as a civilization but we’ve still got a long way to go.”