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‘Friendship Nine’ exonerated

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A circuit court judge in Rock Hill, S.C., this week overturned the convictions of nine African American men who helped to pioneer the “jail, no bail” strategy used during the famous “lunch counter protests” of the civil rights movement.

The men were called the “Friendship Nine” after the Rock Hill, S.C. college that eight of them had attended. In 1961, the nine men decided to make a statement about the plight of the segregated south and began a sit-in movement at a five-and-dime store, McCrory’s,  in downtown Rock Hill. This week, the attorney who has represented the men for more than 50 years is scheduled to return to court …this time to have their names cleared. Circuit Court Judge John C. Hayes III, who will preside over the hearing, is the nephew of the judge who originally sentenced them for trespassing and unlawful conduct when they sat down at the segregated lunch counter.

The men of the Friendship College wondered then whether paying fines and bail—to the very people who had oppressed them—was the best course of action. Rather than pay the $100 fine for their release, each felt they could make a more profound statement by accepting full punishment for trespassing: 30 days at hard labor. Lunch counter protests had gained favor among civil rights activists; two years before the Friendship Nine, many Black students sought to break the barrier of segregated lunch counters by sitting in the “White only” section at an F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C.  As the protests spread from Greensboro to other parts of the south, protesters were arrested and charged. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP, SCLC. and CORE had to pay the mounting bills and fines the protesters were incurring. With funds dwindling daily, the “jail, no bail” strategy  began.

“It showed that this was a moral crusade against injustice,” said Rolundus Rice of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. “Most of the support came from working-class African Americans, so it was very expensive to bail out a lot of protesters. So, in a sense, what they did is turn the system on its head . . . If you are going to incarcerate me, you are going to pay for it.”

The men of the Friendship Nine included John Gaines, Thomas Gaither, Clarence Henry Graham, W.T. “Dub” Massey, Robert McCullough, Willie McCleod, James Wells, David Williamson Jr. and Mack  Workman. All are alive but McCullough, who died in 2006 at age 64.

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