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 Their "jail, no bail" strategy helped galvanize the fight against
racial inequality in the South and became a model for other
protesters. But the "Friendship Nine," as the men became known,
endured personal hardships for taking the bold stand.
They say the push to clear their names so long after the Jan. 31,
1961, sit-in in Rock Hill will have little effect on their lives.
Still, they welcome the message it sends at a time of sharpened
focus on U.S. race relations following white police killings of
unarmed black men in Missouri and New York.
"For the generations that are here now and for the future, it shows
that the country was wrong," said one of the men, Willie McCleod,
72.
The convictions are among a number of decades-old cases that have
been revisited across the South in recent years as courts
acknowledge racial injustice in the criminal justice system.
Author Kimberly Johnson, who published a children's book about the
Friendship Nine last year, began to seek vindication for the men
after reading what Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 while he was
jailed for demonstrating against discrimination of African
Americans.
 In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," King argued he had a moral
duty to stand up to unjust laws. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere," he wrote.
The U.S. holiday honoring King, who was assassinated in 1968, is on
Monday.
Johnson said she was struck by the similarity of the nonviolent
approaches by King and those of the Friendship Nine, most of whom
were attending Friendship College when they agreed to risk arrest at
the McCrory's five-and-dime store's lunch counter.
A NEW SIT-IN STRATEGY
At the time, the sit-in movement that had begun in 1960 at a
Woolworth's segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina,
was losing steam. Organizers thought they could draw more attention
if protesters went to jail instead of continuing to pay fines.
Clarence Graham, 72, agreed to participate and remembers being
dragged out of McCrory's by police. Just 17, he knew that some
people who went to jail during that turbulent era were not seen
again.
"We didn't know what to expect," he said. "It was not a very good
time."
The group served 30-day sentences doing hard labor at the county
prison farm. They carried the stigma of a criminal record much
longer, they said, and for years did not talk about the experience,
even with their own families.
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"I had fears about someone exposing me, saying: 'Do you know what he
did?'" said Willie Thomas "Dub" Massey, 72, who went on to serve in
the Army and later became an educator and minister.
A few years after the sit-in, actions like the Friendship Nine's
were no longer a crime. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964
requires that all races have equal access to restaurants and other
public places.
Solicitor Kevin Brackett, who since 2006 has overseen prosecutions
in the judicial circuit that includes Rock Hill, said past
suggestions to expunge the men's records or pursue pardons seemed
inappropriate because those strategies would erase an important part
of history or imply the men were seeking forgiveness.
Prodded by Kimberly Johnson to take another look, Brackett settled
upon a different tactic. On Jan. 28, he will argue that the men's
convictions for trespassing should be thrown out because their skin
color was the sole reason for their arrests.
Most of the eight surviving members of the Friendship Nine plan to
attend the hearing, which will be held in a courtroom about 500
yards from where the sit-in occurred. Their records will still
reflect their arrests but will show they were not guilty of a crime,
Brackett said.
"What these gentlemen did was take a courageous stand against an
obnoxious and vile policy," Brackett said. "It’s important that we
publicly and legally recognize the wrongfulness of those
convictions."
(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Von Ahn)
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