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Afterword Unable to earn a living through the practice of medicine, Hereford faced extraordinary hardships in the years after 1993. Adding to his financial woes was the painful loss of his place in the black community and the special status that physicians had traditionally enjoyed. As his former patients drifted off to other doctors, he struggled with how to reaffirm his own sense of worth. Over time, Hereford began trying to define a new role for himself, much of it focused on his earlier civil rights activities. During the 1990s, as Huntsville began pondering the meaning of the civil rights movement to its own history, he became a frequent guest on local radio and television shows, explaining what life had once been like in the city that now prided itself on its progressive spirit. Every January and February, as part of events celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and Black History month, his calendar began filling up with appearances at local schools, libraries, and churches. The young Councill student of the 1940s whose stuttering had been so bad that he could not give the valedictory address proved to be a formidable speaker. Providing powerful visual confirmation of Hereford’s testimony were his homemade films,which until now had sat largely undisturbed in boxes,fifty spools of unedited footage documenting the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1962, the marches on the square, the mass meetings at the black churches, Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit in March, the integration of Big Spring Park on Mother’s Day, and the counterdemonstrations during George Wallace’s speech on the courthouse steps during Armed Forces Day.Using inexpensive videocassette recording machines , Hereford copied portions of the footage to VCR format, from which he produced a film that ran eighty minutes. Hereford received much-needed help from a historian at the Huntsville branch of Calhoun Community College named Waymon E. Burke, who had earlier taught Hereford’s children at Butler High School. As a native of Huntsville, Dr. Burke had been moved by the civil rights story told in Hereford’s homemade film and had used it as a primary document in his Advanced Placement Afterword / 145 history classes. Now, as division chair at Calhoun’s Huntsville campus, he hired Hereford as an adjunct instructor of biology,physiology,and anatomy.The teaching brought in only a modest income, but it helped Hereford survive, and he took pride in the positive evaluations he received and in the opportunity to make his medical knowledge useful to others. Burke also conceived a plan to produce a more polished, classroom length version of Hereford’s eighty-minute film, this one supplemented by interviews of Hereford and other local civil rights leaders. In his role as director of Calhoun ’s Center for the Study of Southern Political Culture, Burke secured funding for the project, including a grant from the Alabama Humanities Foundation . In February 1999, the forty-six minute documentary, A Civil Rights Journey, had its premiere on the Calhoun campus and was soon part of the holdings of many local schools and libraries. Several years later, producers of a documentary on the civil rights movement in Birmingham used assorted scenes from Hereford’s footage on Huntsville as historical background.The film was called MightyTimes:The Children’s March and went on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2005. Slowly, the city began to accord belated recognition to the black activists who had provided a model for peaceful change during the 1960s and had thus helped Huntsville avoid the images of violence and bloodshed still associated with cities like Birmingham. On August 28, 1995, in recognition of the thirtieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an honorary resolution, signed by the mayor and members of the City Council, paid tribute to Sonnie and Martha Hereford and to their son, Sonnie Hereford IV, along with Dr. John Cashin, his late wife, Joan, and fifty-one others who had been involved in securing voting rights “for citizens in the Huntsville community and the world.” Nine years later, a marker was dedicated at the site of the now demolished Fifth Avenue Elementary School, where, on September 9, 1963, as duly noted in the inscription , “Sonnie Hereford IV became the first African-American student to integrate public schools in Alabama.”1 For Hereford, the role that he played in the civil rights movement represented the crowning achievement of his life. Clearly, his efforts were...

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