On the morning of Sept. 4, 1957, the first day of school, a 15-year-old girl named Dorothy Counts approached Harry P. Harding High School in Charlotte. Harding High had an all-white student body. Dorothy was the first Black student to ever attend. A mob was waiting for her. They spat at her, and on her. They screamed things like, “Go back to Africa, burrhead!” Wearing a dress her grandmother had sewn for her, Dorothy maintained a quiet dignity as she endured the abuse. She remembered what her father had told her: “Hold your head high. Remember that you’re inferior to no one.” Don Sturkey, a Charlotte Observer photographer, took a photo of her and the mob that was reprinted and seen around the world. She attended Harding High for four days until, fearing for her safety, her family sent her to relatives in Philadelphia.
Some three decades later and 2,000 miles south, a boy was growing up in Medellín, Colombia, in a home where half the floor was dirt. Manolo Betancur saw the photo and others as he read about the Civil Rights Movement. He’d eventually serve as an officer in the Colombian military before he emigrated to the United States and worked his way from a stifling Miami warehouse to a degree from a small college in Tennessee. Later, as a businessman and community leader, he would follow Dorothy’s example. Through his own words and actions, Betancur would send the same fundamental message: I, and my fellow Latino immigrants, are worthy of respect, inferior to no one. It so happened that Manolo would deliver that message in the same city Dorothy had.
