(energetic music) - [Narrator] On the icy cold morning of January 31st, 1961, 10 students started the mile-long walk from Friendship Junior College to McCrory's Five & Dime Store on Main Street in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Nervous yet prepared for what was to come, the young men made their way through the crowd to the lunch counter while patrons and police officers watched.

- I had this nervous issue in my stomach, and I know it came from fear.

You know, they call it butterflies, but I call it fear.

- [Narrator] The young men climbed onto the stools at the counter and awaited service.

Within seconds, police officers yanked each of them from their seats as the surrounding crowd yelled and taunted them.

- They grabbed me up by the seat of my pants and my shoulder, and carry me out the back door.

- [Narrator] Officers dragged the students across the street to the nearby police station where they were booked and charged with trespassing and breach of peace.

The students were thrown in jail and sentenced to 30 days of hard labor on the York County chain gag.

What followed would spark a movement reaching far beyond the city of Rock Hill and the state of South Carolina, and set into motion a new strategy in the growing civil rights movement.

(dramatic music) - And on set with us to give an historical perspective, are author and historian, Damon Fordham and historian, businessman and pastor Chris Levy Johnson.

Thank you, gentlemen, for being with us today.

We appreciate your time.

- You're welcome.

- This Jail Nobel documentary, it's looking at the Friendship Nine, which originally were the Friendship 10, if you will.

- Right.

- But the Friendship nine, the students, 1961, the sit-ins, they went to jail but refused to pay bail.

In your opinion, Reverend Levy, what's the significance of those students deciding not to pay bail?

- I think it's very significant because beforehand with all the arrests, the NAACP, SNCC, CORE, some organization, some civil rights organization had pooled money together, brought the neighborhoods together, brought the community together to spend their own money, hardworking, hard-earned money that they needed, I'm sure, for other things to bail people out of jail.

And so these young men decided that instead of, I wanna say wasted, but not really wasted, because people start to have to sacrifice their own money.

They would not take any bail money, and they would serve their time, and they put, therefore, the onus on the white community to pay for their jail time, to pay for their food, pay for the water, pay using city and I guess municipal dollars to pay for them to stay in jail.

So it did two things.

Number one, it of course it saved the organizations money, but it also made the white community pay for the movement.

- So, Damon, looking at that same statement, what difference did it make that they did not pay bail after they went to jail?

How did that enhance what they were doing.

- On a number of levels because see, there's precedent to this.

Back in 1958 when Dr. King was arrested back in Montgomery, Alabama, where when they realized there was an unjust arrest, there was an unknown member of the city fathers that paid Dr. King's way out because they realized that to have him in jail would hurt their cause.

So people like Dub Massey and Thomas Gaither and the students who were involved with this case, these young men studied such things.

And so they understood that if they didn't pay the bail, number one, it would galvanize the attention of the nation because you had a number of other citizens in South Carolina prior to this point.

Plus, it would in fact show how committed these men were to it, and with the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on a national level rallying to their cause, that would bring further attention to this cause.

So it wouldn't fade in the headlines because of all these other things that were going on at the time.

- Looking at this sit-in situation where these young people refused to pay bail, was this the first time that that had happened or had this happened before in other parts of the state or in the country?

- We, again, and for us to say that would be historically probably inaccurate because we don't really know.

I will say this, this is the first time that it was nationally publicized.

- Right.

- We believe that, especially in South Carolina, there were many acts of retaliation.

There were many acts of civil unrest that went unreported.

And we know that many things happened that never got any publicity.

We also know that throughout the United States of America during this time period, that students and civil rights workers were protesting in many different ways, in many different manners.

We will tell you this, that this is the first time that it got national publicity.

But can we say that it never happened any place before?

We cannot historically say that correctly.

- Do we know why this got national publicity?

- Well, it's largely due to the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

People such as Diane Nash and a very young John Lewis, who's now the congressman from Georgia.

The documentary, in fact, deals with how they basically went to people like Jet Magazine along with the gentleman in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the photographer Cecil Williams.

- Yes.

Okay.

- He fed a live wire of all of this through Jet Magazine, and other national sources, so that the national publicity that resulted from that focus put Rock Hill on the spotlight for having these young, well-educated college students in jail for just basically trying to exercise the rights that were already constitutional.

- Yeah.

I think it's interesting, Mr. Levy, you were talking about the fact that a lot of things that happened right here in South Carolina didn't get any kind of publicity, and that there is a thought that, listen, everything went great in South Carolina.

- Right, right.

- There was no civil rights strife here.

Everything went really smoothly.

- Right.

- You say that's not necessarily the case.

- At all.

Since the beginning of the creation of this settlement called South Carolina, the founders of the colony were very smart in making sure that they're never publicized unrest, especially with the slaves, all right?

And so there's a history of that because South Carolina, again, is the only colony that became a state where the majority of the population were African Americans.

So they knew for peace reasons, for violence reasons, that they could never let the public know that they were not in charge of the slave community and never wanted the slave community also to know that they were in the majority in the state as well.

So a lot of reprisals, a lot of rebellions were squashed.

And so it would not get publicity leading up all the way to the Civil Rights Movement, where historians, especially some South Carolina historians, would paint a picture and would argue that the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina were very peaceful, where you don't see the dogs attacking people as you would see in Alabama, Mississippi.

You don't see the unrest that happened during the Freedom Riot.

So they would make that argument, but that argument is very untrue.

- Interesting.

Let's look at what this perpetuated.

What came out of this Jail Nobel situation with the publicity that it got.

Did that make other things happen?

- Well, it did because it's also important to understand too that, I mentioned that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were among the main people who publicized this.

They came through Rock Hill several months later, as a matter of fact, as part of the Freedom Rides, and they were attacked in Rock Hill.

And recently a man who was involved with that apologized to John Lewis for his role in beating these people.

But the thing to understand about a lot of this is that the United States was forced to act, because at that time, the Soviet Union was the enemy of the United States through the Cold War and sun.

And they were using the publicity for the sit-in to point out the hypocrisy that was happening to the United States of America when they were criticizing other nations for their violation of human rights.

And John F. Kennedy, who was then the President, his brother Robert, were so embarrassed by these open comparisons that they were forced to act on this issue in favor of civil rights.

- Yes.

- What's very important, I think if you could gimme a minute to trace this historical legacy.

- Sure.

- The glass ceiling that separated the races and created segregation, the United States of America, it took little nicks to dismantle.

That glass was put up in 1896 with Plessy versus Ferguson, when the United States Supreme Court decided that separate was equal, okay.

And so that rule, that separate but equal clause created Jim Crow in the South.

It created the southern apartheid.

Then, of course, with 1954, with the Brown versus Board of Education, you see that the United States Supreme Court said that segregation was illegal in public schools.

And so they integrated public schools, and public schools only, because the federal government contributed funds to state public schools, so they had that control.

Then you see in 1957, just four years later, a civil rights bill giving African Americans the right to vote, but it was not enforced.

See, a lot of people, it was watered down.

But did do two things.

It created the Department of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice and created a commission on civil rights.

So then, three years later, you see the Greensboro sit-ins, and a year later, you see what happens in Rock Hill.

Two years later you see what happens in Birmingham with Dr. King.

And so what's happening is the African Americans are just chipping away.

Chipping away.

- [Author] It's on the continuum.

- Yeah, it's on the continuum.

You can't look at this thing in a vacuum, that one day these nine students decide to go to McCrory's and sit down.

You know, history doesn't work that way.

There was a process by which we got to that point.

And so this is part of the continuum of them just chipping away one piece at a time to knock this ceiling down.

- And it's also important to remember too, that prior to the Rock Hill case, they were a number of sit-ins in Charleston, South Carolina.

One of them, which involved Harvey Gantt, who was eventually the mayor of Charlotte.

There was another in Spartanburg, where you had a number of students, including an 11-year-old girl by the name of a Carol Moore-Richard, who were chased by a mob after they were forced from the Cress in the Woolworths in Spartanburg.

And there was also a case in Columbia where they had the protest of the Cress, where a young man, I believe his name was Lenny Hayton, if I recall correctly, was stabbed for protesting in front of the store.

- Let's talk, because you mentioned earlier an area where the Ku Klux claim was really strong.

- York, South York County.

- York County.

- Right, right just North of Rock Hill.

- And so when you said it was really strong, what happened in York County.

- In 1871, you had a mass uprising of the Ku Klux Klan that led President Ulysses S Grant to call federal troops to put down these horrible instances.

And when this Klan was brutalizing a lot of individuals and so forth, a lot of that, as a matter of fact, led the Klan to be outlawed by 1873.

But one source, Lou Faulkner Williams book on the Ku Klux Klan uprisings of 1871 and 1872, notes that almost the entire white male population of York County had joined the Ku Klux Klan at that point.

Most of these people were ex Confederate soldiers.

So the Klan was actually outlawed in the United States from 1873 until its rebirth in 1915.

However, you had other groups that did a lot of Klan type activities, such as the Red Shirts and the Knights of the White Chameleon, et cetera.

So a lot of that plays into Rock Hill's history when it comes to dealing with these issues.

- Yeah.

Go ahead.

- Yeah, we also have to realize, even though York County now, because it buffers Charlotte, it seems so progressive.

In this day it was called the Back Country, all right.

And so in the Back Country you could do Backwoods things.

- [Author] Exactly.

- And so one of the gentlemen in the documentary talks about that they were scared for their lives in Rocky Hill.

That at any moment, if any African American act out a step, you could be shot dead straight on the street because of the presence of the Ku Klux Klan.

And that's one thing that's not talked about.

You know, we talk about Pulaski, Tennessee, we talk about the KKK down in the deep South, but the KKK was strong in South Carolina.

- There's one gentleman who decided to put up bail and to get out of jail.

I think he was on a football scholarship or something like that.

Do you think he was ostracized then by the other nine?

- A personal story, when I was at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, we were trying to get our own, what's called Black Cultural Center.

We wanted our own black cultural center a freestanding building, and the university would not give it to us.

And so we marched on the campus of the University of North Carolina.

We took over the administration building, had a sit-in in the administration building, took over the president's office.

And then the police came and says, you know, "you're trespassing, you have to leave now or else you're gonna be arrested."

All but 10 of us left.

But I don't think it says anything different about the other 400 of us who decided not to get arrested.. That we were sold out, let's say, because we didn't get arrested.

You know, we just decided, we were proud of them, we were saluting them, we were clapping for 'em.

We bailed them out.

But at that moment, you know, you have to weigh your life and make a decision for you right then.

"Am I going to jail to make a statement or I'm going be staying in college."

- So I think that gentleman should be respected, even from making it as far as he did.

- Right.

- When it came to that, because to even just the very act of going in that lunch counter and sitting down when they know they could be assaulted.

And then by principal, they were forced to be nonviolent about it.

I mean, that takes more courage than a lot of people who would criticize these individuals I think.

- Yeah.

I'm assuming that there were a lot of adults who at that time, were really concerned and who actually tried to talk their young people, their children out of participating.

- Oh, yes.

- Right.

- That was a very frequent occurrence at that time.

A lot of people who were involved with that will honestly tell you that that was the case.

Jesse Jackson's father at one point forbade his son to go into a sit-in against Greenville's libraries back in the year 1960.

- But on the other side, King knew when he did Project C in Birmingham, he was criticized for encouraging the kids and asking the parents to allow their kids to lead the marches.

And the reason was, I mean, people were really upset with him because the dogs and the water hose started on the kids but it was strategic.

Just like our brothers in Rock Hill, they did stuff strategically, not just to do it.

The strategy was that King knew that to change the South, he had to change America's conscious.

So he want America to see that in the south they will sick dogs on little children.

- Now, we talked a little earlier too, about the fact that Rock Hill was severely segregated during this period of time, and that black people were really, really afraid for their lives.

- Correct.

- Do you think that young people really were the ones that had the vision of the foresight to see, like, "we can change this?"

- Well, by and large, I would say that they did.

Because what often happens is that as you grow up in the system and as you grow older, time has a way of making people adapt to certain ways of thinking and then they become, as they get older, hardened and resistant to change.

Young people are taught at a very early age that if you do the right things, everything will be fair and just to you.

And when they see that, they tend to react in a harsher way than most adults who had gotten accustomed to the system would react.

So since they're still young and still filled with all that idealism, it would only be natural being that they're still young enough to believe in the fairness and justice of it all, that they would go out and do this.

- I think also the historians do this all the time, on the counter argument is I also believe that the younger you are, the more risk you will take.

Okay, and so there's a difference between being a 60 year old man who's the foreman of a white-owned company and a 19 year old college student.

Whether that guy wants to risk his job, risk his livelihood, risk his position in society.

And I think he has the right to say, you know, Hey, I'm gonna go to the meeting.

I'm gonna probably give some money, but I'm not gonna be out on the street because I know if they see me out in the street marching, I'm gonna lose my job, lose my house, and my family's gonna have some problems.

Compared to the 19 year old who's just a college student, you know, who doesn't have those responsibilities, and doesn't have all this, you know, he can take more risks and do more things.

And that's why SNCC and CORE were so important because the young community mobilized.

Hey, some would argue the reason why we have our President now, that the young community of the United States of America.

You know, racism is taught.

Now, one of the great things is the reason why we don't have racism like we used to have racism is because luckily there are persons who are not teaching their children to be racist.

Those activities, that racist thought was taught, it was learned, it was a learned behavior, it's not innate.

And so this generation is different.

They have not been taught that there's a difference between being black and white or that black persons or Hispanic persons are less than.

So they don't have that same consciousness.

And so that's why the country mobilized a couple years ago and elected an African American president.

- I do wonder why, going back to the Jail Nobel, what is the significance, you think, have you even thought about this, of the lunch counters?

Why the sit-ins at the lunch counters, the Woolworths, the Cress', McCrory's?

- Well, basically the idea was that you could really not logically find an explanation for the idea that an individual was able to go into a store, pay for the various items in that store, but not be allowed to sit down and eat, even though, this individual has patronize the store in other ways.

And what these people wanted to do was to point out the open injustice of something like that to the nation and to the world.

Because while you could say that you may not want a person in your household or your neighborhood due to personal choice, the fact you live there.

The idea that you have a public business that's able to serve individuals in every other way but the lunch counter, it would take a very advanced person of theory to try to make sense out of something like that to people who didn't grow up under that system.

So once you hold that up under the light of people who don't live like this, they will more than likely say, "Hey, something is wrong with this."

Because it's often like the telephone pole in front of your house.

You see it so often that you don't think about it anymore.

And that you accept it as a part of reality.

Well it takes a person on the outside to look at that and say, "Hey, there's something in front of your house, see?"

So that was the idea behind this.

- Yeah.

And I know a lot of times too, the police who went in to arrest these young people, what do you think, the thinking process for these police, people that you said may have been members of the Ku Klux Klan?

- Well, two things.

Number one, there was a joy in beating African Americans.

They got joy out of that, all right?

But second of all, they were making examples out of these men to prevent other African Americans from bucking the system.

And most plantations and most endurance slavery, when a person was whipped, it was a public whipping where they would bring the entire plantation together, string someone to a tree and say, "if you do this, try to run away, break a hoe, steal a chicken, this is what would happen to you."

And then in those cases, a lot of times they would even have an African American, you know, one of their own slaves whip the person.

And so they were creating imagery in the minds of the African-American populace.

Likewise, with these sit-ins, I mean, they were brutalized, hot coffee was poured on them, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup were thrown on 'em.

They were drug from the chairs outside.

You know, they were made examples of, it was spectator sport, you know, to make them into embarrassing to show the community, especially the African American community that here are the rules and here are the regulations, here are the lines which you stay in.

If you get outta the line, this is what will happen to you.

- But it's also important to mention too, that usually in those days, it was not uncommon to have people on the police force that were literally illiterate and poorly educated.

You see, what would happen was, even going back to slavery and even into the system that we're discussing today, the white power structure would often use the poorest and least educated members of the white community as shock troops for this type of thing.

Because these individuals personal security was based on the idea that we may be at the bottom of our society, but there are this group of people who are socially beneath us in order to maintain their position.

They tended to act more brutally toward these individuals than say the governor or a senator or a mayor.

So essentially, individuals like this were used as sort of shock troops as a means of dividing and conquer the poor and white, black communities so both will be exploited.

- And it's still going on today.

You know, even in some poor Caucasian communities, at least we're not African American.. And so what the planner class did and what the white power structure did was say, "you can be part of us.

You're not really going to be us, but you going to help us keep the Negro in his place.

So even though you poor and don't have even have shoes like they do, at least you're not them.

So we are gonna make you kind of part of the club, but you're gonna do our bidding for us.

We are gonna stay the elite and you're still gonna be the poor white, but we are gonna work together to keep the Negros in their place."

- And that divide and conquer strategy is the prime reason behind racism in the southern United States.

- Absolutely.

- I know in the documentary, they talk about the young men, well the older men now, they talk about the fact that they actually had to work on chain gangs.

What was the effect of a chain gang?

- Brutal work.

I mean, it was likened to slavery.

It's the plantation system.

Most of us in the African American community have watched the movie, Life.

It's a comedy with Martin Lawrence and the late Bernie Mac.

And it's about, I don't know what state it is, but it's about African American- - [Author] Mississippi - Mississippi.

worked in a segregated chain gang.

And what they did was bus rocks and dig ditches all day long.

And there's nothing more likened to slavery than working in the chain gang.

- And the idea behind that too was to form a permanent class of cheap labor for the states.

And in fact, that movie even deals with the fact of that matter.

- Yeah.

But I know in the documentary, the guy said, "we'd move dirt from one spot to the other spot, and then move it back to the same spot all over again."

- Right.

Well see, the thing was that a person who was over chain gang, this is an overseer on the plantation, they would have absolute control over you.

So you're taking a person who is the most oppressed and least respected member of his society and put an individual with those type of complexes over other people, that type of abuse will happen.

Because he's taking out his frustration on these individuals he's in control over.

- Is there any possibility or any chance that you think incidences like this, a history like this, will actually be put into our history books for our young people?

- Well that's why we're here because see, while these people are still alive, we can document those things because in those days, of course these things were not reported because a lot of times the media was owned by a lot of the respectable families of these areas.

And on a chamber of commerce type level, they didn't wanna put out bad publicity of the areas in which they live.

However, there are people who are still alive that we can talk to and put this out.

And individuals like ourselves who go out and study these things and bring them out before the public in order to make it well known, because there are thousands of stories like this that are not known that we need to do this with.

And I have to explain to my students all the time, there's more to history than what you see in that classroom textbook.

- Yeah, absolutely.

What do you think, this tweaking of that sit-in situation, what do you think it really meant from a historical perspective really quickly?

- I think it meant no turning back.

I think the system changed how they were operating to the fact that we are willing to risk our bodies and our lives and even our rights that we already have for full civil rights.

I think that's what made it so important.

It was a change in the strategy.

- I think it was important because it showed young people across the nation the effect of which other young people were willing to go in order to make society better than it was then.

And it encouraged a lot of those young people to help work it to make the society what it is today.

And so if young people today were to see something like this, maybe it would inspire them to make the further changes that are needed to make the society where it should be.

- Okay guys, thank you so much.

Always great talking with you.

Always bring great insight to the show.

We appreciate you today.

And watch for the new Carolina Stories Documentary, Jail Nobel, on ETV Thursday, February 3rd at nine o'clock and Sunday, February 6th at 4:00 PM.

And we really wanna hear from you.

Our mailing address is Connections, SCETV, Post Office Box 11000, Columbia, South Carolina 29211.

Our email address is connections@scetv.org.

And for more information about how you can participate, go to the connections website at www.scetv.org/connections.

Well, that's our show.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Remember, stay connected.

I'm P.A.

Bennett and I'll see you next time right here on Connections.

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