Court to toss Friendship Nine’s convictions for sit-in protests

The men, dubbed the Friendship Nine after the Rock Hill, South Carolina, college that eight of them attended, were looking to make a statement about the plight of the segregated South.

And that’s just what they did.

On Wednesday, the attorney who represented the men almost five and a half decades ago is scheduled to return to court to have their names cleared. In a poetic twist, Circuit Court Judge John C. Hayes III, who will preside over the hearing, is the nephew of the judge who originally sentenced these largely unsung civil rights heroes.

The prosecutor who pushed for this momentous day, 16th Circuit Solicitor Kevin Brackett of Rock Hill, leans on a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when asked why he was motivated to take up the cause of the Friendship Nine: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Sitting stood for something

Lunch counter protests had become the cause celebre the year before, in 1960, just two hours up the road in Greensboro, North Carolina. African-Americans, many of them students, sought to break the barrier of segregated lunch counters by sitting in “white-only” sections.

As the protests spread from Greensboro to other parts of the South, protesters were arrested and charged. Civil rights groups had to pay the mounting bails and fines that the protesters were incurring.

This was a moral crusade against injustice.

W.T. “Dub” Massey graduated from Friendship and went on to get his master’s degree from nearby Winthrop University. He spent his career teaching in public schools. He’s now semiretired (he still picks up a class or two as a substitute teacher).

— Robert McCullough, the valedictorian of his high school before going to Friendship, was known by many as “brilliant” and was a natural leader for the group. After college, he joined the Air Force. He earned degrees from Winthrop University in business administration and political science before returning to Friendship to teach. McCullough died in 2006 at age 64.

— Willie McCleod was involved in the protest movement before coming to Friendship. After college, he volunteered for the Army and came home to Rock Hill after his service and started a business. He lives in Rock Hill and occasionally speaks to community groups about the events of the 1960s.

— James Wells graduated from Friendship and went on to enlist in the Air Force. After his time in the military, he went back to school and earned a law degree from the University of Illinois. He practiced law in Columbia, South Carolina, before retiring in Rock Hill.

— David Williamson Jr. moved to the North after school before returning to the Carolinas, where he became a banker and property manager. He has retired from full-time work but still works as a substitute teacher at Rock Hill schools.

— Mack Workman moved to New York after school and worked with troubled children as part of the state Office of Children and Family Services. He retired in 2006 and still lives in New York.

CNN’s Victor Blackwell and Eliott C. McLaughlin contributed to this report.

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