ROCK HILL, S.C. — At 75 years old, Willie McLeod knows all the steps to his special seat at the Five and Dine diner in Rock Hill.
“We’re sitting here now at peace,” McLeod said.
But when he was 17 years old, he was dragged off to jail for sitting in the exact same seat.
In 1961, the Five and Dine was a McRory’s convenience store with a lunch counter that was off-limits to blacks.
[PHOTOS: Friendship 9 changed history 54 years ago in Rock Hill]
McLeod is part of the Friendship 9, a group of nine black students from nearby Friendship Junior College, along with their advisor, who decided they would be the first protesters to use a new “Jail No Bail” strategy.
[Friendship 9 changed history 54 years ago in Rock Hill]
“When they refused to serve us they said, ‘You need to get up and leave.’ We said, ‘No we’re not.’ That’s when the policeman picked us up off the stool and carried us out the rear door,” McLeod said. “They put us in solitary confinement.”
McLeod and his friends knew civil rights organizations were bailing other protesters out of jail. But that was draining groups like the NAACP of money, so the Friendship 9 knew a stronger statement had to be made.
That’s why they were the first to stay in jail. They suffered through hard labor on a chain gang during their 30-day sentence.
“That really shifted the movement and put the burden of the oppression on the oppressor and that hadn’t been done before, so it was a monumental step in the civil rights movement,” said author Dr. Kimberly Johnson, who wrote a children’s book about the Friendship 9.
The attention of Johnson’s book led a judge in 2015 to clear the Friendship 9’s criminal convictions after 54 years.
[Judge: 'We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history']
[Nine things about the Friendship Nine]
“It was worth it. What we did was called for and it helped the community,” McLeod said.
After the Friendship 9 survived the ordeal, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others across the South started using their “Jail No Bail” approach.
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