Friendship Nine

The Friendship Nine was a group of African American men who went to jail after staging a sit-in at a segregated McCrory's lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1961. The group gained nationwide attention because they followed an untried strategy called "jail, no bail," which lessened the huge financial burden civil rights groups were facing as the sit-in movement spread across the South. They became known as the Friendship Nine because eight of the nine men were students at Rock Hill's Friendship Junior College. They are sometimes referred to as the Rock Hill Nine.

Background

The first sit-in happened in February 1960 when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The movement spread across the South, reaching Rock Hill on Feb. 12, when about 100 black students staged sit-ins at various downtown lunch counters. Over the next year, several sit-ins were held in the city.

The arrests

On Jan. 31, 1961, students from Friendship Junior College and others picketed McCrory's on Main Street in Rock Hill to protest the segregated lunch counters at the business. They walked in, took seats at the counter and ordered hamburgers, soft drinks and coffee. The students were refused service and ordered to leave. When they didn't, they were arrested.

The next day, 10 were convicted of trespassing and breach of the peace and sentenced to serve 30 days in jail or to pay a $100 fine. One man paid a fine, but the remaining nine — eight of whom were Friendship students —chose to take the sentence of 30 days hard labor at the York County Prison Farm. Their choosing jail over a fine or bail marked a first in the civil rights movement and sparked the "jail, no bail" strategy that came to be emulated in other places.

The nine

As of 2007, eight of the Friendship Nine are living.

* Robert McCullough (died on August 7, 2006)
* John Gaines
* Thomas Gaither (at the time, he was a field secretary with the Congress of Racial Equality and was the only one of the nine who was not a Friendship student)
* Clarence Graham
* W.T. "Dub" Massey
* Willie McCleod
* James Wells
* David Williamson Jr.
* Mack Workman

The significance

"What made the Rock Hill action so timely ... was that it responded to a tactical dilemma that was arising in SNCC discussions across the South: how to avoid the crippling limitations of scarce bail money," wrote Taylor Branch in "Parting the Waters," his Pulitzer Prize winning account of the Civil Rights Movement. "The obvious advantage of 'jail, no bail' was that it reversed financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food. The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up, and bail-out."

External links

* [http://media.heraldonline.com/smedia/2007/01/27/15/friendshipnine.source.prod_affiliate.6.mov Heraldonline video of historic marker ceremony in 2007]