A 1961 story of civil disobedience in Rock Hill is the subject of a new short film that explores the importance of food in connecting Americans.
The visual retelling of the “Jail, No Bail,” strategy employed by nine Friendship Junior College students who wanted to get served at a whites-only lunch counter quickly spread as a strategy of protesters who didn’t want to pay bail money to fund city governments that oppressed blacks, says John T. Edge, a well-known Southern food writer and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. It commissioned five short films last year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
Yesterday’s lessons have great relevance today, he explained in a summary of the film series, called “Counter Histories:”
“During the summer and fall of 2014, fifty years after the desegregation of lunch counters and other places of public accommodation, another season of social unrest and upheaval has roiled our nation. Sparked by the killing of black men by white police officers, demonstrations and protests erupted. Many were peaceful. Some were violent. Issues of racism, civil rights, and injustice have proved catalytic again. ‘Counter Histories’ connects the protests and demonstrations of today and yesterday, equipping viewers to ask questions about the role of civil disobedience in the face of systemic racism and injustice.”
Later this month, the surviving members of Rock Hill’s Friendship 9, who served 30 days of hard labor in the York County Jail after being arrested in January 1961, are likely to have their convictions vacated when 16th Circuit Solicitor Kevin Brackett reopens the case in a special court hearing. He told the Rock Hill Herald in November that “The conviction all those years ago was an unjust conviction under an unjust law.”
What happened in 1961
On Jan. 31, 1961, 10 black students from Friendship College entered McCrory’s department store in downtown Rock Hill and tried to order lunch. Under the Jim Crow laws of the time, blacks couldn’t sit down to order, but had to stand at the counter, wait for food and go outside to eat it.
In short order, police arrested the students. “We were snatched up from our seats,” one of the protesters recalled in the film. All but one of the 10 students decided they would go for “Jail, No Bail” and serve 30 days hard labor instead of paying a $100 fine. These men became known as the Friendship 9.
Also in the film, Rock Hill Mayor Doug Echols added, “Discrimination was occurring everywhere and so only where there were those special individuals, like the Friendship 9 which stepped forward, did change begin to take place.”
Soon after the Rock Hill sit-in, the city’s businesses closed lunch counters. According to the film, “Integration of restaurant spaces in Rock Hill did not happen until federally mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
The importance of food in Southern culture
For the Southern Foodways Alliance, food is a cultural connector that brings people together in many ways. Just look at what people ate for good luck on New Year’s Day — greens, peas and rice, classic foods of the old South that were staples to blacks and prepared for and by whites at plantations and in kitchens across the South.
Thinking eaters, Edge explained in 2011, understand how food connects Southerners and shows they have more in common than they may think. Using food as a backdrop gives the SFA “a teaching moment,” he says, because people tend not to think about race, class or other separations when eating.
“You are as much African in your cultural composition as you are western European,” he told Charleston Currents.
About the film
Filmmaker Kate Medley of Durham, N.C., developed the idea for a series of short films to commemorate the importance of food in the civil disobedience protests that led to the Civil Rights Act 50 years ago.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize there were dozens of these sit-ins — around 100 of these around the country that never got any press, but had a lot of economic and social impact,” said Medley, producer of the film series. “I thought it was real important to tell this story of this micromovement in the civil rights movement and demonstrate how eating spaces were such an important part of the movement — how that was sort of a central place of activism.”
The series, she said, links what happened then to today.
“The goal of this project is to relate what happened 50 years ago to what is happening in Ferguson (Missouri) today, to New York today — to spur people to ask questions of themselves, such as ‘What would I have done in 1964?’ and ‘What am I doing in 2014?’”
The film’s executive producer, Ellen Barnard, credits director Frederick Taylor (Fr3deR1cK) with using more than documentary footage and interviews with the remaining members of the 1961 protest to tell the Rock Hill story.
“[He] really wanted to appeal to a new generation of non-historians and people who were born well after this era,” she said. “And [he] felt very strongly about how this would appeal to young black men. We settled on doing a casting in the local colleges to find young black men who could represent the best of then and of the future.”
She later added, “We liked the idea of telling the story of a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement when a strategy changed to the one that would eventually lead to the kind of action that led to more awareness and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.”
- MORE: You can watch the Rock Hill film online here | See all five films.
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