Next to a lunch counter that was segregated for so long sat a table of two white people and five black people Friday afternoon. Just another Friday in Rock Hill, South Carolina, January 2009.
Conversation quickly took the group back to Jan. 31, 1961.
Elwin Wilson, one of those white men, had come that day to that very lunch counter four steps from where he was now, wanting to pull one of those black men off of the stool he was sitting on. He wanted to give a beating.
The other white man, Steve Coleman, had been just outside, among so many, wanting to scream racial epithets.
But 48 years later, Wilson, now 72, and Coleman, in his mid-60s, wanted something entirely different from these five black people.
They wanted forgiveness.
These black men and women -- just a few of the folks known as the "Friendship Nine" and the "City Girls" -- have been honored in museums.
They have been apologized to by politicians.
Their names are etched on stools at that lunch counter.
But never before had any of the white men from that day in 1961 asked to meet any of them, and sit down with them where it all started and apologize for hating them.
So, David Williamson and Willie McCleod, Phyllis Hyatt and Elsie Springs, and for sure Patricia Sims, didn't skip a beat to forgive.
Williamson said words that he and the other men and women protesters have said for decades.
"We accept your apology," Williamson said. "We forgave everybody a long time ago."
'Jail, no bail'
Williamson spoke with authority in this place that had changed his life and this nation because his name is on the stool behind him. Etched in chrome, forever. He and the other blacks at that table Friday, long ago students at Friendship Junior College, fought segregation at that lunch counter and other places in Rock Hill in 1960 and 1961.
The black men, who with seven others came to be known as the "Friendship Nine," sat on the stools 48 years ago, Jan. 31, 1961, then spent 30 days on the chain gang for the crime of being black and wanting service where whites ate.
These black women at the table, called the "City Girls," marched for equality outside in 1960 and 1961, right alongside the men after all the publicity of the arrest and "jail, no bail" strategy. The action helped spark a civil rights movement across the South that didn't end until segregation was dead.
The Friendship Nine are, along with Williamson and McCleod, John Gaines, Thomas Gaither, Clarence Graham, W.T. Massey, James Wells, Mack Workman and the late Robert McCullough.
The known City Girls are, with Hyatt, Springs and Sims, Olivette McClurkin and Lucilla Wallace Reese.
'Meanest man' in Rock Hill
Wilson started with: "I was once the meanest man that ever was in Rock Hill." He was there Friday to tell people whom he had hated for so much of his life that he had changed. He was not going to be denied saying what he came to say, and all five black people were gracious and let him.
Wilson spoke of how he was one of the men who beat up Freedom Riders at the Rock Hill bus station in May 1961. He told of trying to pull a protester from a stool earlier that year, Jan. 31, 1961 -- the day that changed Rock Hill forever and 48 years later brought these seven people together.
"I'm not proud of this," Wilson said, to which Williamson replied immediately as he fought back tears that he has cried so many times in his life, "We are not here to judge you."
These black people didn't so much as blink when Wilson said he did so much "bad" to black people in his long life. But today he was there "with kindness in my heart."
Wilson said he wanted to apologize because, "God led me to do it."
"He will do that," said one of those women, Phyllis Hyatt, who sure knows what faith will do in life when marching as a black person in the segregated South could have meant injury or death.
"Sure sounds like you turned into a Christian," said the other black man at the table, Willie McCleod.
"We all get a second chance, and this is it," Williamson said. "It's a blessing."
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