Rock Hill, SC — Fifty-four years after nine black men served a month of hard labor for ordering food at a whites-only lunch counter, a judge has vacated their convictions.
The courtroom was packed with more waiting outside as Judge Robert C Hayes III vacated the trespassing and breach-of-peace convictions Wednesday morning of the men known as the Friendship Nine.
Eight Friendship Junior College students and a civil rights organizer were arrested in February 1961 for ordering lunch from a whites-only counter in Rock Hill. Convicted of trespassing and breach of peace, the men opted for a month’s hard labor rather than allow bail to be posted for them by civil rights groups.
Their no-bail example was followed by other demonstrators throughout the South.
Solicitor Kevin Brackett called the conviction “wrong then and wrong now.”
