Photos were taken downtown Rock Hill, SC on December 16, 2023.
Photo Credit: Chris Conyers
Friendship Nine
“On January 31, 1961, nine students attending Friendship College (an HBCU Founded in 1891) in Rock Hill, South Carolina ordered coffee or cokes and hamburgers at McCrory’s Five and Dime store in Rock Hill. The establishment denied the students service, so the students chose to sit-in at the serving counter. Law enforcement, enforcing Jim Crow laws, charged the students with tres- passing and fined each student $100.00 bail with the option to serve 30 days on the chain gang. Attorney Ernest A. Finney, Jr., later South Carolina’s first Black Supreme Court Justice since Reconstruction, represented the students at the trial. All except one student refused to pay the bail and served a jail sentence on the charges of trespassing. The students’ action became known as “Jail-no-bail” which called attention to the discrimination. Jail-no-bail kept the system from making money at the students’ expense by jailing them and making them pay to avoid serving time while enabling the system to enforce Jim Crow laws. The group became known as the Friendship Nine.”
From: Blazing Toward Freedom
by Dr. Carolyn Pearson Jenkins
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