Every April at Winthrop University, our student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists hosts a reception honoring our top high school essayists.
This year, 40 students, from six high schools in the Carolinas, wrote an essay on "Why Free News Media Are Important."
Our top essayists for 2009--recognized, along with their teachers and parents, yesterday:
First Place, Paul Avinger of Heathwood Episcopal School in Columbia, S.C.
Second Place, Taylor Snyder of South Point High School in Rock Hill, S.C.
Third Place (co-winner), Cassie Stanton of Lugoff-Elgin High School, Lugoff, S.C.
Third Place (co-winner), Jalen Williams of South Point High School in Rock Hill, S.C.
Honorable Mention, Rachel Wolf of Heathwood Episcopal School in Columbia, S.C.
I had the high privilege at yesterday's reception of meeting two of the First Amendment trailblazers of the early 1960s. Willie McCleod, a member of the Friendship Nine, was there to celebrate his niece--Jalen Williams (our co-third place winner.)
In a picture accompanying this blog post, see Mr. McCleod, his niece Jalen and yours truly. In another picture is Mr. McCleod and fellow Friendship Nine member Clarence Graham--also at yesterday's reception for our winners. The remaining photo shows yours truly with my department chair, Dr. Bill Click, and Mr. Graham. Thanks to Winthrop journalism student Brittany Guilfoyle for snapping these photos.
For expressing their First Amendment freedoms at a Rock Hill restaurant, McCrory's, in 1961, Mr. McCleod and Mr. Graham were imprisoned for 30 days at hard labor.
Their "crime": ordering food, and declining to leave when management ordered them to, at then segregated McCrory's on Main Street. Mr. McCleod, Mr. Graham and seven other freedom-conscious African-American men (all of them at that time students at Friendship College in Rock Hill) stood their ground, insisting, peacefully, that they be served at McCrory's lunch counter.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Friendship Nine, as they came to be called, helped pave the way for others in the Civil Rights movement. Preferring jail and hard labor over being rejected at that lunch counter in Rock Hill, McCleod and Graham and their fellow students, according to one Civil Rights historian, were the vanguard of sparking the "jail/no bail" sit-in movement that was copied in other places throughout the South. (Jail for the Civil Rights protesters meant white authorities had to spend precious resources--food and money and manpower--on trying to contain a movement that just grew stronger, more popular and more vigorous.
But back to Mr. McCleod's niece, Jalen. Here, in part, is what she wrote in her essay:
"As a little girl, when I used to take over night visits to my Uncle Willie's house, he never told me the story of the Friendship Nine. He and 8 other black Friendship College students went to stage a sit-in at McCrory's restaurant and were arrested. Unlike the story with Emit Till, the light was shined on this dark story and it was put into the public eye. So I ask. . . you, how free media plays (a) role in these events that are entwined with civil rights issues? It has to do (with) how media interprets these events and whether or not it is is pulled into the public view. Emit Till's story was hushed by media and people when it occurred. A horrid murder pushed into the dark crevices of history, to remain so silent, that it's almost deafening. My uncle, in fact was lucky, lucky as in not to have been beaten by the police. Lucky as in to be alive to tell the story to newspapers and TV interviews. To share his account to the world, to give the nation an idea what a drastic period of segregation we used to be in. . . One of these stories is the truth of the media bringing civil right(s) events into the open, the other one is a story of monstrous actions being hidden in the shadows of the society of the Deep South."
Nicely put, Jalen.
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