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Days of Hope and Courage
Reunion will celebrate historic local Civil Rights sit-ins
By Frye Gaillard
- Mecklenburg County,Public Library of Charlotte and Courtesy of Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room
- Sit-In protestors in Downtown Charlotte, 1960 (Robert Hunt, Joan Adams Siler, Ann Frazier Walker, and Virginia Lee)
Page 4 of 4
"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.
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