First Black students attend Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville schools 60 years ago this week
This story is part of AL.com’s “1963 Season of Change” series. See more coverage here.
This week in Alabama history marks a momentous shift: For the first time, Black students attended previously all-white schools in Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville and Tuskegee.
School desegregation, ordered by a judge in several school districts for the first week of September 1963, nine years after Brown v. Board of Education, occurred in fits and starts.
In Macon County, the first school district to integrate, Gov. George Wallace ordered Tuskegee High closed due to “safety concerns.”
When Black students arrived a week later, every white student withdrew. They formed a new private school, the first among many “desegregation academies.”
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth right, integration leader, escorts Dwight Armstrong, 9, and his brother Floyd, 11, from the Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Ala, Sept. 9, 1963. State troopers, on order from the governor, opened the school but turned the African Americans away. Threats against Black institutions are deeply rooted in U.S. history and leaders say the history of violence against people of color should be passed on to new generations so the lessons of the past can be applied to the present. (AP Photo, File)AP
In Birmingham, students like Frank and Dwight Armstrong were blocked from attending their first day of school by state troopers.
“There was a lot of opposition to us,” Dwight Armstrong told AL.com in 2013. “We had always been a civil rights family. We didn’t go to be martyrs. Our father, who was a World War II vet, didn’t migrate North, like so many many others, looking for better opportunities. He wanted to make Alabama better. That was his dream; that was his purpose in life.”
On Sept. 10, after a week of turmoil, President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and Black students successfully entered Birmingham schools.
At Birmingham’s newly integrated West End High School, nine people were arrested — two after a battle with police — as demonstrators gathered and 1,000 white students refused to enter.
Former students recalled bomb threats and rumors of violence.
Meanwhile in Huntsville, 25 white students walked past state police and entered desegregated schools.
Sonnie W. Hereford IV, 6, enters the Fifth Avenue Elementary School in Huntsville, Ala., Sept. 9, 1963, accompanied by his father, S.W. Hereford III, as a city detective looks on. The black youngster was denied entrance to the same previously white school on Friday when Alabama state patrolmen barred the door. (AP Photo)ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Sept. 9, after being turned away several times, Sonnie Hereford IV became the first Black child to successfully attend a white public school in Alabama.
“City and school officials today praised Huntsville residents as racial barriers fell at four city schools without signs of serious trouble,” a Huntsville Times article said on Sept. 9, 1963.
With Alabama State Troopers blocking the main entrance to Murphy High School, students Dorothy Bridget Davis, 16, and Henry Hobdy, 17, arms loaded with school books, turn away from school, Sept. 9, 1963 in Mobile, Alabama. Hobdy is reading his copy of an executive order from Gov. George Wallace stopping the pair from attending classes. (AP Photo/Fred Noel)ASSOCIATED PRESS
And in Mobile, Birdie Mae Davis sued the school system in order to attend Murphy High. She and two other students successfully desegregated Mobile schools, with help from longtime NAACP leader John LeFlore.
Davis and Hobdy attended their first classes at Murphy on September 10, 1963, after a federal judge barred Wallace from further interference at the school.
In 1967, Judge Frank Johnson expanded desegregation orders to schools across the state. But it would take decades for some districts to successfully integrate. Many others have yet to prove to courts that they are no longer operating “dual systems of education.”
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AL.com and Alabama Vintage are examining 60 years of school desegregation in the state. Future coverage will focus on some of the first Black students to attend white schools in September of 1963 – and their thoughts on where schools are headed today.
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