In February 1961 Clarence Graham made history. A student at Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he was convicted, along with eight other civil rights protesters, of trespass. They refused to pay the $100 fine and were sentenced to 30 days’ hard labor.
Their crime was taking a seat at a ‘whites only’ lunch counter and attempting to order food.
“People were being lynched, shot, killed everyday,” Graham, who was 17 years old at the time of the protest, recalls. “We knew that hecklers would threaten us, throw bottles at us. We knew there was a danger in what we were doing, the risk was very high.”
But it wasn’t the physical risk the men took that made their action significant. The protest became the first realisation of a new tactic adopted by the movement: ‘Jail, No Bail’. The tactic forced states and localities that arrested protesters to deal with the knock-on effects of those arrests: not just added publicity, but the cost of keeping people incarcerated.
“We had no idea it was as monumental as it would turn out to be,” Graham told the Guardian. “We expected some change but we had no idea we’d be talking about it this long.”
For 54 years Graham, along with John Gaines, Thomas Gaither, Willie McCleod, WT Massey, James Wells, David Williamson Jr, Mack Workman and Robert McCullough (who died in 2006) remained convicted criminals.
On Wednesday that changed. In a packed courtroom in South Carolina’s 16th circuit, seven of the remaining members of the group stood again. (One, Gaither, had his son stand in for him.)
They faced a white prosecutor, circuit solicitor Kevin Brackett, and were represented by the same lawyer who took their case five decades ago, Ernest Finney. The court was presided over by Judge John Hayes III, the nephew of the man who had sent the nine to York County prison farm five decades ago.
“These courageous and determined South Carolinians have shown by their conduct and their faith that the relief that they seek should be granted. I move for the convictions entered in 1961 to be vacated,” said the now 83-year-old Finney, who, after the first trial, became South Carolina’s first African American state supreme court justice since Reconstruction.
This time there was no argument from the state.
“There is only one reason these men were arrested … and that is because they were black,” Brackett said. “It was wrong then, it’s wrong today.”
“We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history,” Judge Hayes said.
The convictions were vacated.
Speaking to the Guardian on his way back from court, Brackett said that Rock Hill residents had been calling for a pardon for many years. Since historians placed their radical action as a major turning point in the civil rights movement, the Friendship Nine have been embraced by the community.
“But a pardon implies they were seeking forgiveness, that were looking for absolution for some error that they committed. That did not seem appropriate to me,” Brackett said.
Eventually Brackett decided to invoke Rule 29 of the South Carolina Rules of Criminal Procedure, usually reserved for miscarriages of justice when DNA evidence or new witness testimony comes to light.
“There was no specific piece of evidence that I could point to and say ‘this changes everything’, but what I could say was that in the intervening 54 years of this conviction there has been a sea change in the attitude in the US.”
Outside the court, Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter Bernice King, described the events as “a monumental day, for not just civil rights but human rights and human dignity.”
Clarence Graham described a mixture of relief and exhilaration.
Asked what message he thought the court decision sent to young protesters in Ferguson and around the US, Graham, who is now a father of five, grandfather of 14 and great grandfather of six, was clear: “I always tell the kids you don’t just walk out there and start protesting … You’ve got to have something that you really believe in. If you’ve got passion, go for it, but first of all investigate what it is, organise yourself, a plan of action and then do it.”
He continued: “We still have non-violent tactics. We can still use them. What happened today should prove that things can be done in a non-violent movement and be successful.”
