In February 2011, it’s a new and exciting era in Rock Hill and York County — one open with all sorts of possibilities and opportunities. And while things aren’t perfect, they could be much worse.
Flash back, for example, 50 years ago to that day in early 1961 when 10 young African-Americans (nine of whom were students from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill) politely but firmly stood their ground at the then-segregated McCrory’s lunch counter on Main Street. When they refused to budge from that eatery after management would not serve them their orders of sandwiches and soft drinks, police arrested them on charges of breach of peace and trespassing.
The 10 civil rights activists were David Williamson Jr., Willie McCleod, John Gaines, Thomas Gaither (a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality), Clarence Graham, W.T. “Dub” Massey, James Wells, Mack Workman, Charles Taylor and Robert McCullough. (McCullough is deceased.)
One of the students, Taylor, paid the $100 fine and returned to school. But the other nine suffered 30 days of hard labor, on the chain gang, at the county jail.
They reasoned that their cause for human rights would draw more attention if they did time in jail. The students also knew that the white power structure of that era had but so much time and money to deal with those who would challenge the status quo of the Jim Crow South.
Turns out, the young men were right. A movement gained traction. Thousands more brave (but nonviolent) black students joined the cause, sitting in at lunch counters across the South. They went to jail instead of bowing to the status quo of not being served in white-only eating places. Historians have said the national media’s spotlighting of the “jail, no bail” strategy sparked a tipping point in the shaping of American public opinion in favor of the black protestors.
But if you believe all this happened in the blink of an eye in Rock Hill or elsewhere, you’d be mistaken. The struggle for human rights — for an America where blacks and whites are treated the same and have the same opportunities for a quality life — was long, arduous and sometimes ugly. And even today in Rock Hill and the rest of the South, some would say the struggle continues.
Yes, America has a black man as president and many African-Americans in key leadership positions in industry, business, education and the military. But in 2011, unemployment and prison incarceration rates and infant mortalities among blacks are much higher than those for whites. (In South Carolina, for example, a state that is about one-third black, 69 percent of the prison population is black. And in black neighborhoods throughout the U.S., the unemployment rate for blacks is about twice that for whites.) Another dismaying statistic: Blacks in the U.S. earn only about 58 percent of what whites get paid, and the percentage of people of color in America living below the poverty line is much higher than that for whites.
On the other hand, if you compare the racial climate in Rock Hill of 2011 to that of 1961, the community has made giant strides.
A veteran journalist reflects
Marshall Doswell, long-time retired associate editor of the Evening Herald newspaper in Rock Hill, noted how far they’ve come when he spoke in January 2007 at a plaque dedication ceremony honoring the Friendship Nine. There were actually two Rock Hills of 50 years ago, according to Doswell, now 89: one for blacks and one for white people.
“Three fourths of the people where white. They ran things,” Doswell recalled at that dedication ceremony. “The City Council was white. The city administration was white. The police department was white. The fire department was white. The school board was white. The school administrators where white. The downtown business section was white. … The Evening Herald where I worked was white, except for the press crew.
“And then there were the black people, the other fourth of the population,” he continued. “They had their own churches and their own neighborhoods. The black children went to all-black schools. Their school buildings were not as nice. The jobs available to black people were at the low end of the scale. Black people could be maids, or servants, or janitors, or garbage collectors, or handymen. In the textile mills they could be sweepers or muscle heavy cotton bales. They could not have the better jobs. Because of that, most of them could not afford cars.
“Black people could not eat in white restaurants or at white lunch counters,” Doswell added. “They could not stay in white hotels or motels. There were separate waiting rooms for whites and blacks in train stations and bus stations and even doctor’s offices. Blacks could not use white water fountains, or white rest rooms. … On buses, blacks were required to sit in the back seats. They could not sit in front of white people, or beside white people. … They were not allowed to sit in white churches.”
Doswell went on later in his speech to describe how positive social and cultural change had come to Rock Hill by 2007. Four years ago, for example, many area teachers, coaches, principals and school administrators, including school board members, were black. That trend continues today. The current police chief is black, as are many of the city’s police officers and firefighters. And at Winthrop University, where I teach journalism and where for many decades the white flower maidens of the South (and only the white ones, mind you) came to learn the finer points of being homemakers and school teachers, the student body in 2011 is about 27 percent black.
But again, all this progress toward positive social and cultural change for black people in Rock Hill didn’t happen overnight.
And to say the struggle, in 2011, for equal opportunity and a quality life for black people is over, is to miss the point completely.
David Boone kept helping folks despite KKK threats
There’s still work to be done, according to Brother David Boone, a member for the past 60 years of The Oratory in Rock Hill, a congregation of priests and brothers who serve the spiritual needs of York Countians.
Boone, 78, was smack dab in the middle of the touch-and-go civil rights struggle in Rock Hill and York County a half-century ago. In an era of the pinnacle of power of the White Citizens Council and the KKK, he befriended and supported folks in the black community at that time (and still does today), administering sacraments to them, working with them on marriage preparations and assisting with their religious education. Boone also helps out in a local soup kitchen which feeds 80-120 people a day.
“The young blacks of today cannot imagine why the blacks of those days (50 years ago) put up with so much and had so much against them,” he said.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rock Hill, Boone, who had been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, co-chaired a local effort for voter registration.
The soft-spoken, gentle Boone is self-deprecating when you ask him today about those KKK threats of long ago: “Luckily, I was protected by a wall [The Oratory] that they couldn’t reach over,” he said. “And I never took phone calls. Someone always took my phone calls for me. Very rarely did I get a taste of their venom.”
Despite the huge strides that black folks have made over the past 50 years in Rock Hill, Boone says that by no means are things perfect. He notes, for example, that today’s unemployment rate for black males is way too high “and the drug trade is very rampant today in the black community because it’s a way of income, and unfortunately with drugs, comes violence …”
“We need not to forget our history.”
One well-known and respected African-American Rock Hillian who was born in 1941 and grew up in a segregated society in the 1950s, is Bessie Moody-Lawrence. She is a former public school teacher and retired education professor at Winthrop who served 16 years in the S.C. General Assembly representing York County District 49 as a Democrat.
Moody-Lawrence, whose daughter Leah is a member of the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees, remembers the separate water fountains for blacks and whites, the separate seating on buses, and going to the back of the line at stores.
And when she headed off from the bus station in Chester to school at S.C. State University, she remembers that she and her big trunk “packed with all my things” had to go to the back of the bus.
She credits groups like the Friendship Nine with changing the social and cultural landscape in America.
“The public accommodations came about because of the sit-ins,” said Moody-Lawrence, only the third black person to serve in S.C. House District 49 in the General Assembly. “Life changed because of that. Children today have to realize that it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have access to public accommodations. … I lived as a child in a segregated society and into integration. But I’m not bitter. I think we need not to forget our history. We need to celebrate our history.”
“We knew we were doing the right thing.”
And then there’s Dub Massey — 68 today but barely 18 when he and his fellow Friendship Junior College students sat themselves down on those bar stools at McCrory’s Five & Dime Store (now the Old Town Bistro) on Rock Hill’s Main Street in February 1961.
Massey, after that historic sit-in and jailing, would be drafted into the U.S. Army. Then he’d earn his bachelor’s degree from Johnson C. Smith University and would pick up a master’s in counseling and education specialty degree in administration from Winthrop.
Married to the former Joyce Goode for the past 43 years, Dub retired as a guidance counselor at York Comprehensive High School in 1995 after 28 years working in S.C. public schools and two years of service in the military.
Today, you’ll find the 2004-heart-attack survivor father of two children still at it (as an instructional assistant) with kids at Hunter Street Elementary School in York. He keeps busy, too, with his duties as associate minister at Langrum Branch Baptist Church in York.
But flash back briefly to the early 1960s. A passage in Lynn Willoughby’s book The Good Town Does Well: Rock Hill, S.C., 1852-2002 recounts how Massey seems to have had a close encounter with death — all for the sake of the civil rights struggle: “… once when Dub Massey led ten people to sit at a lunch counter, the owner exploded in rage,” Willoughby writes. “‘You better get out of my place. This is my livelihood, and you’re destroying my family,’ he yelled at them. Massey replied that they were not there to destroy him, only to give him some business and if he would just serve them, there would not have to be any conflict. The white man grabbed a pistol and held it to Massey’s temple.
“‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to blow your brains out,’ he told him. Massey replied respectfully that they were not leaving, at which time the white man called for somebody to ‘get the cops, get the police. Get ’em out of here before I kill ’em all.'”
Massey says today that the event chronicled in Willoughby’s book did indeed happen but not at McCrory’s. He thinks it occurred across the street, either at what was then Smith’s Drugs or Tollison and Neal.
“We did these sit-ins daily. We came down here several times a week,” he said, recalling that the students with him that particular day were all young ladies from Friendship College.
So Massey has a gun to his head. The white racist manager or owner has his finger on the trigger. The man with the gun is angry, fidgety. Was Massey afraid?
“I didn’t think about fear,” said Massey, interviewed recently for this story at a booth in the Old Town Bistro (formerly McCrory’s) just a few feet from a bar stool that has his name engraved on the back of it. “I thought about my responsibility as a line leader. I was responsible for them [the young women]. My intent was to make him back off. … We came there to eat. But at a certain point — it might have been in about 15 minutes — I said, ‘Let’s go.'”
The ordained Baptist minister says young blacks of today (2011) aren’t informed about what civil rights struggles occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s as if, he says, that youngsters think their rights occurred through osmosis.
“To them, progress would be made racially without anything that we did in the past,” he said. “That’s pretty much their opinion. I say that because I work with them. I know their thinking. … They know, but it really doesn’t matter … whatever will happen will happen. They have no clue about the sacrifices that were made. … The only things they’re concerned about is, just like my son, his automobile and his mode of transportation. They’re just out of the loop completely.”
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2011.
