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Black civil rights protesters who helped reinvigorate the 1960s U.S. sit-in movement against segregated lunch counters will appear in a South Carolina court on Wednesday to be celebrated instead of criminalized for standing up to racial injustice. A judge is expected to vacate the 54-year-old trespassing convictions of the "Friendship Nine," a group of mostly students at the now-closed Friendship College who agreed to risk arrest by sitting at the McCrory's five-and-dime store lunch counter in Rock Hill on Jan. 31, 1961. Hauled to jail and quickly found guilty, they became the first U.S. civil rights protesters to opt to serve jail time for sitting at an all-white lunch counter, helping launch the "jail, no bail" strategy that became a model for other activists. "It breathed new life into the sit-in movement," said Adolphus Belk Jr., director of the African-American studies program at Winthrop University in Rock Hill.
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