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‘Our ultimate choice is desegregation or disintegration’ – to repair the lost words of a prison civil rights strategist
View of the Friendship 9 students who protested against racial discrimination and were imprisoned, Rock Hill, South Carolina, February 1961. Afro American Newspapers / Gado via Getty Images In a cramped cell in a prison camp in South Carolina, A 22-year-old African American activist Thomas Gaither wrote: “I am currently thinking deeply about what our country and our particular region of the country value the most.” It was Thursday, February 23, 1961, and Gaither was serving a 30-day hard labor term for a road gang for what police called a “violation,” when he and Friendship Junior College students had a sit-in. offered a rock. Hill, South Carolina, lunch counter. The letter he wrote was on day 23. Gaither wrote on a folded sheet of paper in response to Alice Spearman, a white civil rights lawyer and executive director of the South Carolina Council for Human Relations. Gaither told Spearman that he praised “the concern you and many other Americans have shown for us because we were imprisoned here, and moreover for the cause for which we suffer …” Ugly, distasteful and irrational attitudes as here in “SC and all of South Africa are suppressing justice and the glowing opportunity for America to become the leader of the world again,” he wrote. For the nation, says Gaither, ‘our ultimate choice is desegregation or disintegration. For nearly 60 years, Gaither’s powerful words on yellowed paper lay deep in one book in the South Caroliniana Library. The carefully written letter came to light as scholars at the University of South Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, where one of us, Bobby J. Donaldson, is the director, and reviewed material for an exhibition entitled “Justice for All,” which tells through hundreds of documents such as Gaither’s letter the long history of the African-American struggle for justice and civil rights in South Carolina. press release by SNCC in which the Friendship Nine believes is the inspiration for other students arrested for a next lunch-sit-in. Wisconsin Historical Society Training a Movement Architect In 1960, students moved to the forefront of civil rights activism. in the US with an independent movement of seats for lunch and mass marches to demonstrate segregation. Inspired by the February 1 sit-in of four university students in Greenborough, North Carolina, thousands of students offered sit-ins throughout cities throughout South Africa. One of the largest movements took place in the university town of Orangeburg, South Carolina, where Gaither was a senior at Claflin College and Charles McDew, the future chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a student at South Carolina State College. . After organizing Orangeburg protests, Gaither was appointed field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, an interracial alliance formed in Chicago in the 1940s that used direct violence to draw the public’s attention to social injustice. He was assigned to Rock Hill, near his hometown of Great Falls, South Carolina. After a fall of training, Gaither restricted a month of student sit-ins with a special protest, which led the group of freshman students from Friendship Junior College in the Rock Hill McCrory store on January 31, 1961. The police and television news staff were waiting, and a driver immediately told the students, “We can not serve you here.” After only 15 seconds, the police stormed in, pushed the students off the lunch stool and marched them approximately to the nearby town hall. Typical of courts in the Jim Crow South, Gaither and the students stood trial the next morning. They were summarily convicted. In an attempt to end seats, the judge threatened the students with a sentence of hard labor or bail from US0. Instead, the students planned to spend time in the prison farm in a “Jail, No Bail” strategy. Gaither learned the tactic during a 1960 CORE conference in Florida; thereafter, he trained Friendship Junior College students in it. The group that would be known as the “Friendship Nine” hoped to resurrect the sit-in movement and push the cost of enforcing segregation in the city, rather than on civil rights supporters, who each times paid significant bail. students were arrested. The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading African-American newspaper widely distributed in South Carolina and the South, has an article entitled ‘Jail … No Bail Is’ Sit-ins ‘New Approach’. South Carolina journalist John McCray said it was clear that the idea of placing school children in the chain gang ‘shocked almost everyone’. ‘New civil rights strategy Inside the prison, armed guards forced the prisoners to work hard. Outside, the message is spreading about their “Jail, No Bail” campaign. Within a week, Charles Sherrod, J. Charles Jones, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee traveled from a meeting in Atlanta to set up a seat in the same Rock Hill lunch counter, in protest on the treatment of the Friendship Nine. and was also jailed. New York Times reporter Claude Sitton travels to Rock Hill to write about Gaither and his companions in a story with the headline: “Students declare they will not pay bail or pay well – seen a new campaign.” In the article, SNCC leaders encouraged other students from the region to join ‘lunch with them and in jail’ with them. Gaither, in an interview with Civil Rights History Project in 2014, discusses the ‘Jail No Bail’ strategy. As public demonstrations of support for the students increased, the warden increased his pressure on them and forced them to work twice as hard as those of the other hard labor prisoners. When one of them, John Gaines, objected to their treatment, the warden removed him from the group and locked the rest of the men in solitary confinement again. “We are aware of what could happen to a lone Negro ‘stirrer’ in the hands of white southern prison guards, ‘Gaither later wrote,’ we were afraid for Gaines’ safety. ‘The students launched a hunger strike until they learned where and how Gaines was. On the third day, the dreaded prison officials told the students that Gaines had been transferred to the city’s prison. The Friendship Nine ended their hunger strike. The warden regularly arrested them and terminated the harmful double work. In writing his letter days later, Gaither stressed that the students who sit-ins at lunch ‘do not seek to make headlines in the newspaper or to disable any shop, but to save a lost nation. ‘ In Atlanta, 85 students adopted the “Jail, No Bail” strategy after an arrest and conviction, and their actions directly led to an agreement to desegregate the city’s lunch counter. [Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.] Following his release, Gaither received a new assignment from CORE’s directors. In April 1961, he took a bus south of Washington, DC to New Orleans and explored the route for CORE’s Freedom Rides, which tested the execution of the 1960 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ordered waiting rooms, lunch and toilets for interstate buses had to be separated. and trains. Gaither mapped the entrances and exits of the bus station and prepared for the historic challenge later that month. He leads the group through Sumter, where he did CORE work, and Rock Hill, where riders, including future Congressman John Lewis, encountered their first violent attack. In 2015, a court in South Carolina overturned the sentences of the Friendship Nine and removed them from the convictions. Judge John C. Hayes III, whose uncle originally sentenced the Friendship Nine, said of the bank: “We can not rewrite history, but we can correct history.” On the contrary, the neatly folded letter of Thomas Gaither enables us to revise and revise an important chapter in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. As Gaill supporter Lillian Smith wrote at the time, ‘This is something that should not have happened in our country, and yet it has happened. Why? You and I have to answer that. ‘This article was published from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Bobby J. Donaldson, University of South Carolina. Read more: John Lewis exchanged the typical university experience for activism, arrests and prison cells. How the Ebenezer Baptist Church has been a seat of black power in Atlanta for generations because, consults, owns shares in or receives funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any appropriate commitments outside of their academic appointment .