CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Charlotte's Garden of Forgiveness was dedicated Thursday with a special guest of honor -- the first black woman to attend a Charlotte high school.
"Forgiveness is something that comes from within your heart," Dorothy Counts Scoggins said.
It is something she has been wrestling with since 1957, when at 15 years old she was the first black student to walk into all-white Harding High School during Charlotte's first attempt at integration.
That day she was surrounded by a very different crowd. Classmates taunted her and tossed out rocks and racial slurs.
"I know that my situation at Harding has made me a better human being," Scoggins said.
Sue Keith was a Harding High senior and remembers wanting to tell Scoggins not all in the crowd were against her. She showed up Thursday for the dedication of the forgiveness garden.
"I just told them I've waited to do this all my life, at least since I was a senior in high school," Keith said.
She's wanted to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
"You know, we've written her, but it's not the same and actually coming down I realized how much I just wanted to hold her and got to do that," Keith said.
Other former classmates felt the same way.
"I so wanted to tell you everybody didn't feel that way. I didn't," said another classmate who came to see Scoggins Thursday.
All these years later, they sit together, helping dedicate Charlotte's first forgiveness garden.
"People don't understand how it is I could forgive someone who harassed me and the kinds of things that happened to me," Scoggins said. "It took a lot for you to come forward and ask for forgiveness. How could I not?"
The forgiveness garden, with its unmistakable red bench, was placed in Freedom Park where blacks were once banned. That was about the same time Dorothy Counts first walked into Harding High.
"You were doing what you felt was best and I was doing what I knew was best for me," she said to her former classmates. "The step that you have made to come forward and ask for forgiveness, that shows the kind of person you are."
The garden is open to the public in Freedom Park.
