Days of Hope and Courage 

He heard the news on a February night in 1960, in the desolate hours just before dawn. He was driving south through Virginia on his way home to Charlotte, the radio crackling through the cold morning air. The newscast offered only sketchy details, but the report was exhilarating even so. Four young freshmen at North Carolina A&T, an all-black university in Greensboro, had gone down to the segregated lunch counter at Woolworth's and taken their seats on the white people's stools.Charles Jones listened to the story in amazement. For some time now, he had been obsessed by the cruelty of Southern segregation, that maddening combination of customs and laws that had been in place since the end of Reconstruction. Jones, the grandson of a slave, came from a line of ambitious people, preachers mostly, including his father, J.T. Jones, who wanted the best for the members of his family. But for every African-American in the South, segregation was a crippling, insulting reality, a daily reminder of inferiority from which there seemed to be no escape.

Charles didn't want to believe that was true. He was a seminary student at Johnson C. Smith, a young man of 22, regarded by many of his friends as a dreamer. He had begun to study the philosophy of non-violence -- the writings of Gandhi and some of the speeches of Martin Luther King -- and a few years earlier, in 1956, he was stirred by the photographs from Montgomery, the newspaper images of Negro citizens trudging to work on the gray winter mornings, refusing to ride on the segregated buses.

Eventually, that particular protest had worked. The US Supreme Court struck down segregation on the Alabama buses, and the Montgomery leaders such as King and Rosa Parks became national heroes for many black Americans. But in the rest of the South, segregation survived, and four years after the Montgomery demonstrations, people like Jones and his friends at the college were still at a loss about how to combat it.

Then came the news reports out of Greensboro. More than 40 years later, Jones remembered the adrenalin rush of that moment -- how he heard that the students had taken their seats and refused to obey when the Woolworth's manager ordered them to leave. The straightforward dignity of it took his breath. These four students, whoever they were, had simply declared that the laws of segregation no longer applied. As he thought about the powerful thing they had done, Jones found himself shouting to the great, empty sky: "Thank you, God! This is how we can do it."

It was, he told a reporter years later, "like some kind of cosmic lightning bolt."

When he got back to campus, he met with a group of student council leaders, and declared with a flourish, "I don't know about y'all, but tomorrow morning I'm going downtown, and I'm gon' do what the students in Greensboro did." He had no way of knowing when he said it that his counterparts in more than 50 Southern towns were beginning to make the same kinds of plans. Only later did he learn that all of them were part of the same great awakening.

The Charlotte protests came together quickly, and if Jones was the visionary, the spokesman quoted most often in the press, there were others who emerged from the ranks of the students. Heyward Davenport was a gifted strategist, and behind the scenes there was B.B. DeLaine, a quiet young man from South Carolina with soft, steady eyes and a gentle demeanor, a man who didn't think of himself as an activist. Some of the others thought that was strange, for DeLaine, as much as anybody on campus, had come of age with the civil rights movement.

His father was the Reverend J.A. DeLaine, a fiery leader from Clarendon County, SC, who organized the farmers in that part of the state to file the country's first desegregation lawsuit. Eventually, the case of Briggs vs. Elliott became one of five the Supreme Court considered in its landmark ruling of 1954, outlawing segregation in the schools.

As a child of 12, B.B. DeLaine began attending mass meetings leading up to the lawsuit, and on a trip home from college a few years later, he witnessed first-hand the violent retributions that were now being regularly aimed at his father. One morning he was talking to his mother in the kitchen when he heard a crash near the front of the house. He rushed toward the sound and saw glass on the floor from the living room window and some white men driving away in a car. He grabbed immediately for the family shotgun, but his mother slowed him down, warning him frantically what would happen if he fired.

This was South Carolina, she said. The police would come and take him away, and nobody knew what would happen to him then.

A few years later at Johnson C. Smith, he was grateful for Mattie DeLaine's intervention, especially as he studied the theory of non-violence, the new cornerstone of the civil rights movement. Charles Jones talked about it all the time, telling the students who volunteered for the sit-ins, "We are going to sit at the lunch counter, and we are not going to move. We are not going to cooperate with segregation, but we are going to be on our best behavior. We are not going to talk back. We are not going to return any white people's blows. If you are uncomfortable with that, just remember we are outnumbered, outgunned, so we have to be disciplined and we have to be smart."

Early on the first morning of the protests, Jones put on "Sunday-go-to-meetin'" clothes, and went down to the administration building on the campus, a handsome, 19th century edifice constructed carefully out of handmade bricks. It was a symbol, he knew, of all the ancestors' hopes in the days just after emancipation, when the former slaves set out to build institutions -- churches, schools, even a few universities where they could aspire to the highest educational opportunities.

On that cold winter morning in 1960, Jones could feel a connection between the hopes and dreams of the ancestors' time and the new possibilities of the civil rights movement. He wondered if the other students felt it as well, but in a way he knew that it didn't really matter. The important thing was they were there in force -- maybe 200 strong, waiting to make the trek downtown. Some of them drove their personal cars, a few others walked, and most of them rode on the campus school bus, driven that day by B.B. DeLaine.

They sat in at the counters of a half-dozen Charlotte stores, and day after day they kept coming back. There were racial insults and scattered acts of violence, as young white toughs gathered periodically to spit or heckle or threaten further harm. DeLaine also remembered one policeman who elbowed a coed squarely in the face, knocking her to the ground. But the police most often seemed to be restrained, and so did many of the city's white leaders. And perhaps most importantly in the eyes of Charles Jones, there were committed reporters from the Charlotte Observer and some of the radio and television stations who seemed to be serious about telling the story.

Their dispatches were usually even-handed and fair, and they reported not only what the demonstrators did, but also their explanations about why. Jones himself quoted the Constitution and the Old Testament prophets, talking about equality and Christian brotherhood, and "the great schism in the South between what this region says it believes and how it behaves." The stories went out on the national wires, and looking back on it later, Jones was convinced that the Charlotte demonstrations, as much as those in any other city, delivered an important message to the country.

By the summer of 1960, the combination of moral and economic pressure, intensified by the national publicity, took its toll on Charlotte's white leadership. Many of the businessmen downtown decided finally that enough was enough, and the word went out that it was time for a truce.

"There was an understanding," said Jones, "that if we would just quietly come down and eat, the restaurants and counters downtown would be open."

In early July, to test that promise, Jones went with his father to the Rexall Drugs at Trade and Tryon in the heart of downtown. As the two of them sat down together to order, Jones thought about all those people in the past who had persevered through the years of slavery and segregation. He glanced at his father and saw the glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes, and as he picked up his sandwich, it seemed for a moment as if anything was possible.

But he also knew that the movement in Charlotte, however successful, was only one part of a much larger struggle. A few weeks earlier, he had met with activists from nine Southern states -- more than 150 sit-in veterans gathering in Raleigh at Shaw University. They met with national civil rights leaders, including conference organizer Ella Baker, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the man they found most eloquent of all, a Methodist minister by the name of James Lawson.

Lawson framed the philosophy of the movement this way: "Love is the force by which God binds man to Himself and man to man. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love."

What Lawson was saying was that the students were engaged in an odd kind of war, more heroic and courageous than a violent fit of rage at the massive injustice of the Southern way of life. They would absorb the hatred at the heart of segregation, and through their example they would bring the institution of white supremacy to its knees.

Charles Jones was mesmerized by the notion, and throughout the course of the three-day meeting, he met other students whose enthusiasm was equal to his own. One of those was Diane Nash, a young woman from Fisk University in Nashville who seemed to embody, as much as anybody at the conference, some of the finest ideals of the movement. Many of her peers were struck by her beauty, her large, dark eyes that were gentle and sure, and her manner that at first seemed so unassuming.

In the early days, when she and her friends started meeting in Nashville, planning their first lunch counter sit-ins, she says she was frightened by what they were doing. Growing up in the North, she had seen the horrible photos of Emmett Till, a teenager murdered on a trip to Mississippi when he allegedly said something fresh to a white woman. "I had heard stories of the brutality of the South," she said. "I was duly impressed."

Nevertheless, she became a leader in the Nashville movement, and one day in the spring she confronted the mayor on the steps of City Hall. She demanded to know, as the reporters hovered around taking notes, if he would use the power and prestige of his office to end segregation.

Ben West, one of the most powerful men in Nashville, drew himself up sharply and declared: "I appeal to all citizens to end discrimination, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred."

Nash continued to push. "Then, Mayor, do you recommend that lunch counters be desegregated?"

"Yes," said West, and among people in the movement, it became a legendary moment of triumph.

The Whole South's A Battlefield

Following the meeting at Shaw University, Nash, like Jones, became a leader in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a new organization formed at the conference to coordinate protests throughout the South. Early in 1961, they decided they needed to lend their support to sit-ins taking place in Rock Hill, SC. There, a group of students from Friendship College, led in part by Thomas Gaither, a field organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality, were arrested and sentenced to 30 days hard labor or fines of $100 apiece.

Nine of the students opted for the chain gang.

Their decision came at a time when the civil rights movement all over the South was running low on cash. Thousands of people had been arrested by now, and money for bail was getting harder to raise. In addition, the story was slowly but surely growing stale, as the media and the country began to lose interest. But the specter of students on a Carolina chain gang was something the nation had not yet seen.

It caught the attention of the national press corps, and even more than that, it caught the attention of the leaders in SNCC. At a conference in Atlanta, Charles Jones and the others were deeply moved by the Gandhian example of the Rock Hill students, and immediately set out to join them in jail. The expedition included Jones and Diane Nash and two of the other young sit-in veterans, Charles Sherrod and Ruby Doris Smith.

They were arrested together on February 6, and Nash's mother in Chicago saw it that night on the television news. It was part of the generational agony that was one of the undercurrents of the civil rights movement -- parents who were frightened by the risks and vulnerability of their children, but who also knew that the children were right. Nash did her best to soothe those fears, writing letters home from her cell in the jail. She also wrote a letter to The Rock Hill Herald, the local newspaper, trying to explain the philosophy of the movement.

"Segregation is immoral," she told the white community of Rock Hill. "Seek a world where all men may be as free as you yourself want to be."

For the next 30 days, she did a lot of reading -- the autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi, the patron saint of the non-violent movement -- and along with her cellmate, Ruby Doris Smith, she told one reporter who came to the jail: "The days pass quickly."

For Charles Jones and his comrade Charles Sherrod, the days also went by in a blur. Life on the chain gang was brutally hard. They dug ditches and shoveled wet sand from the bed of a creek, using it later to build concrete pipes. They cleaned up trash from the sides of the highways, and helped sweep the streets -- doing whatever, as Jones later put it, "the gatekeepers felt would be humiliating."

But Jones, Sherrod and the other demonstrators in the Rock Hill jail seemed to be immune to humiliation. To the astonishment of the South Carolina authorities, the young people worked harder than anybody else. They sang the old spirituals every day on the road crew, inspired, said Jones, by the example of the slaves from a hundred years before. The music gave a rhythm and a purpose to the work, a feeling of unity.

"We called it the chain gang shuffle," said Jones.

And every night, no matter how tired, when they returned to the large holding cell at the jail, herded in like cattle, Jones and Sherrod led the others in devotions. Both young men were seminary students, Jones in Charlotte, Sherrod in Virginia, and they would read from the scriptures, and one or the other would give a brief sermonette.

To the jailers' horror, all the black prisoners and even the whites in the cells across the hall began to participate in the services. "Shut up that fuss!" the authorities commanded, and when it continued, the civil rights prisoners were taken away to solitary confinement -- a concrete cell with a toilet and no bed. But even there, they would not relent.

Word of their example quickly spread through the movement, and as historian Taylor Branch later put it, the Rock Hill students and those who came to go to jail with them "set a new standard of psychological commitment." They helped to underscore a new understanding in the ranks of the civil rights demonstrators that "the entire South was a common battlefield."

When his jail term was over, Charles Jones knew he would never be the same. Many years later, he remembered how one of the chain gang guards, a grizzled white man who had presided over this curious young crew with a wad of tobacco and a double-barreled shotgun, called him aside and declared with a kind of bewildered admiration: "I don't agree with what you boys are doing, but you're good boys."

Jones thought then that they were starting to see a little bit of progress, taking their first few steps toward a color-blind society where "all God's children could live together with respect." He had no illusions that the battle was won, or that it would ever be in his own lifetime. But at least, he said, they had begun to make a start.

Diane Nash will begin the sit-in reunion with a roundtable discussion from 3-4:30pm on Friday afternoon, January 31, at Winthrop University. At 8pm, also at Winthrop, she will deliver the keynote address. The following morning at 9 at the Levine Museum of the New South, sit-in veterans and civil rights scholars will begin a daylong series of discussions. The participants include former activists Charles Jones, B.B. DeLaine, Edith Strickland DeLaine, Heyward Davenport, Charles Sherrod, Tom Gaither, Abe Plummer, Dub Massey, Willie McCleod, Betty Houchins Lundy, Thelma Johnson and Elsie White Springs, among others. All sessions are free and open to the public, but space is limited. For more information or to make a reservation, call 704-333-1887.