ROCK HILL, S.C. -- Every now and then
Clarence Graham makes his way back to that old lunch counter in Rock Hill.
He walks through the doors and past the space where shelves of t-shirts and socks, school supplies and toiletries were once sold.
Mothers and aunties would send young boys there for a missing ingredient, or young girls for barrettes and bobby pins. Sweethearts sipped their ice cream floats and Coca-Colas at the counter, and giggled and laughed away lazy summer afternoons. It was a sweet spot in a rough mill town called Rock Hill.
At least it was for some of Rock Hill's residents.
Once upon a time this was
McCrory's Five and Dime Variety Store, and what happened here on January 31, 1961 not only marked a defining moment in Graham's life, but it was a defining moment in the
Civil Rights Movement.
"We had no idea back in 1961 that what we did would blossom into what it is," said Graham, sitting in the reception hall of the Old Town Bistro, formerly McCrory's.
In 1961, Graham was a college student at Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, a town in a region known for its fierce opposition to integration. McCrory's was a variety store where blacks could purchase everyday items but were barred from ordering food or sitting at the lunch counter.
Graham and more than a dozen black demonstrators, all but one students at the college, walked a mile or so from the Friendship campus to McCrory's, singing 'We Shall Overcome' and carrying protest signs demanding equal treatment. After marching up and down the block for awhile, a group of them splintered off and entered the store, heading directly to the lunch counter.
Before they had a chance to order and of course, be denied, police stormed in and dragged the men from their seats to a police station across the street.
Many of them had been arrested before for similar demonstrations.
A little more than a year earlier, on February 12, 1960 (Abraham Lincoln's birthday), about 100 college students from Friendship College converged on lunch counters all across Rock Hill. They descended upon
Woolworth's Department Store, the
Good Drug Company,
J.L. Phillips Drug Company and McCrory's, too. They sat at counters and did the unthinkable: ordered lunch. And they were denied. But they refused to leave their seats, compelling some of the stores to not just close for the day, but to remove the counter stools altogether.
These were some of the first sit-ins, then known as sit-downs, in South Carolina.
In 1961, Graham and eight others accepted 30 days of hard labor at the
York County Prison Farm instead of posting bail, thereby shifting the financial burden to the system rather than helping to fill the coffers of the jailers.
The tactic became known as "jail, no bail," and was adopted by Civil Rights organizations across the country, many who had seen their finances deplete as more protest action meant more arrests and more bail money.
It was a pivotal moment in the movement, and one that Graham said he fears has been largely forgotten.
The youth today have grown selfish, he said, too wrapped up in Facebook and video games, and "how many followers they have" to study their history.
"We've lost a lot of ground because the young people just don't believe, because it hasn't really been documented or taught to them in class," Graham said this week, during a reception held at the Old Town Bistro on behalf of the
Freedom Riders and students retracing their 1961 journey. Graham and three of the eight surviving
Friendship Nine gathered with Rock Hill officials to break bread and trade war stories.
Before the sit-in at McCrory's and "jail, no bail," Graham said that black residents of Rock Hill "couldn't get within ten miles of the place, let alone eat there."
After the sit-in, and 30 days of hard labor on the prison farm, life beyond the lunch counter didn't change much. In the days and months that followed, crosses were burned in his family's front yard. The police would roll slowly down their street in the middle of the night and shine a spotlight into their windows as they slept, he said. His father, who worked the presses at a local newspaper, was threatened. If Graham didn't leave town and stop causing "trouble" his father was told, he would lose his job.
Graham had eight siblings and the family couldn't afford to lose any income.
Eventually he did leave, though. He graduated college in 1962 and joined the Air Force, shipping off to Vietnam in 1965.
A week before he was sent to Vietnam, then stationed in Colorado, he decided to take his new bride back to Rock Hill to honeymoon.
It was a rude return.
He said he pulled up to a local Holiday Inn where a bright and blinking sign read, 'Vacant.' As he approached the front desk, however, the receptionist grimaced and told him, despite his reservation, that there were no rooms available.
"I was in my military uniform and everything," he said. "We were nonviolent when we were in school, but after being trained for combat and coming back to that, it was very difficult to stay in a nonviolent mode at the time. It was a bad feeling."
In the decades after the Civil Rights Movement and after Vietnam, Graham, now a great-grandrather, moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he worked as a caseworker and supervisor for the county child services department. In 2007 he retired and moved back home to Rock Hill.
Forty-Seven years after the sit-in, Graham said he was invited back to the old site of the five and dime to commemorate that moment with all eight of the surviving members of the Friendship Nine. The new owners purchased the property with the commitment of leaving the lunch counter intact and open for tours, he said.
It was Graham's first time back in all those years.
"It was bittersweet," he said. "Why did it take so long?"
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