Skip to main content Our ultimate choice is desegregation or disintegration - recovering the lost words of a jailed civil rights strategist
Bobby J. Donaldson, University of South Carolina
April 9, 2021
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Bobby J. Donaldson, University of South Carolina and Christopher Frear, University of South Carolina
(THE CONVERSATION) In a cramped cell in a South Carolina prison camp, 22-year-old African American activist Thomas Gaither wrote, “I am presently in deep contemplation as to just what our nation and our particular region of the nation prizes most.”
It was Thursday, Feb. 23, 1961, and Gaither was serving a 30-day term of hard labor on a road gang for what police called “trespassing,” when he and students from Friendship Junior College staged a sit-in at a Rock Hill, South Carolina, lunch counter. The letter he was writing marked day 23.
Our ultimate choice is desegregation or disintegration - recovering the lost words of a jailed civil rights strategist
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Our ultimate choice is desegregation or disintegration – recovering the lost words of a jailed civil rights strategist
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The Friendship 9 gather in 2015 when their convictions from staging a sit-in at a Rock Hill diner in 1961 were dismissed. In 1961, a group of Friendship College students in Rock Hill, South Carolina, staged a sit-in at the McCrory s segregated lunch counter. Known as the Friendship 9 , they were immediately arrested and sentenced to 30 days on the chain gang.
Six years ago Thursday, that conviction was vacated. Charges were also dropped that day against four others who participated in the sit in, including Charles Jones of Charlotte, a Johnson C. Smith student at the time. Can you imagine? After all this time, here we are, people of the globe being respected, Charles Jones said then. We never thought that that would happen. We believed.