Understanding her son's choices

Inez Graham grew up in Rock Hill when segregation wasn't called "Jim Crow" - it wasn't called anything, she said.

It just was.

Her granddaughter's childhood in Rock Hill was different. Danise Simpson, now 45, grew up in a newly integrated Rock Hill still rife with racial tension. But it was changing.

Officially, segregation was no more.

That's because Clarence Graham, Inez's son and Danise's father, took a stand for equal rights fifty years ago when he sat down at McCrory's whites-only lunch counter on Main Street in Rock Hill and ordered something to eat.

That event changed his mother's life and ensured for his daughter a different life before she was even born.

"I hate to even try to remember it," says Inez, now "sweet 87" years old, referring to when her son - her second-oldest child of nine - was arrested, refused bail and was ordered to serve 30 days hard labor at the York County Prison Camp.

Instead, the woman who became a minister, in part because of her son's trials, prefers to look forward.

"It was bad, but now it's good. I'm so thankful that God healed me from all that," she said. "I want to forget and thank God for where I am today."

'Born into it'

It was easier for Inez's generation to get along and avoid conflict, she said.

"When you're born into it, you don't know whether it's good or bad," she said.

But the Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in public and the growing opposition to those laws were hard to overlook.

"Water fountains and bathrooms? What was that all about?" she says, almost laughing.

"There was a lot of crazy stuff going on back then," she said. "People were killing each other."

When asked how Jim Crow - a system that made no sense to her - made her feel, she said, "I felt nothing."

That's because peace was her solution. She recalls thinking, "Yeah, I know it's there, but it doesn't bother me because I know who I am."

Then, when her son was swept up in the rising tide of protest in the 1960s, she feared for what might happen to him.

The night before the Friendship Nine were arrested at the lunch counter, Clarence Graham, then an 18-year-old college student, wrestled with telling his parents he planned to refuse bail.

It was a difficult decision, he said, one that could have had severe consequences.

The Friendship Nine - eight from Friendship College and an organizer - heard the same stories Inez grew up with about what happened to black "troublemakers" who refused to go along, Clarence said.

Beyond his risks were those his family would shoulder. Already, their livelihood was threatened.

"My father was employed at The Herald at that time, and he had been warned that if I kept participating, then he was in jeopardy of losing his job," which would have been "devastating" for the family, he said.

Still, Clarence believed what he was doing was necessary and right.

In a letter he left his parents the morning of the protest, he consoled them, saying he wasn't going to jail for a criminal act. He was going for the "betterment of all Negroes."

"So try to see things my way and give us, the younger generation, a chance to prove ourselves, please."

"I wanted them to understand and to hold their heads up," he said.

Tough choices

Inez says she understands now why Clarence risked his life.

"Somebody needed to do it," she said. "People were hating each other, and that ought not to be."

But she admits that, even today, she would not have let him take that risk. "I probably would have spanked him" if he had told her of his plans, she said.

"I didn't want him dead. That was the fear," she said.

But Clarence "wouldn't come out (of jail) and wouldn't give in," she said.

When she'd visit the prison camp during her son's 30-day sentence, she walked along a barbed-wire fence for what seemed like miles, she recalled. Then, once inside, there were "so many people," and she never got to see her son face-to-face.

She would bring cookies, but none of them made it to him, she said.

Then learning Clarence was in solitary confinement - in the "hole" - hurt even more.

"There aren't words to express such stuff," she said.

The trials didn't cease after Clarence was released. Someone burned a cross near the Grahams' house, and Clarence's brother was egged while walking home from the store, Clarence recalls.

"We, as a whole, are not fearful people. We trust in God," Clarence said. But his family "feared for their lives then."

But always looking forward, reluctant to revisit the past, Inez's every thought comes back to her ministry, the calling she found while Clarence was in prison.

To Inez, all the pain in the world comes from one source, and there is only one salve.

There are "two spirits" in the world, she says. "Are we going to be on the right side, or are we going to be lost?"

"At the end, if you don't have Jesus, all this stuff is a waste of time."

'A proud history'

Danise Simpson, Clarence's daughter, has an early memory of being the first black family to move into the Cedarwood Apartments in Rock Hill.

She also remembers an adult pushing her and her younger sister into the closet, hearing glass break, and seeing rocks on the floor.

"They didn't want us out there," she said.

There are other memories, too.

Some were "terrifying," such as getting run off the road in her father's car, her father yelling for her and her sister to get down, the girls crouching in the floorboard.

But others were just normal memories which, looking back, were extraordinary signs of progress, like "integrating the pool" at the apartment complex during a birthday party.

"I didn't really understand what a big deal it was at the time. It was just a pool party," she said.

But what her father went through in 1961 and after "has always been there," she said.

"I've always had a sense of pride, that this is what my dad did. I would never let anyone stop me from doing anything because I know who I am and where I come from," she said. "It's a proud history."

When his daughters were little, Clarence remembers hearing his name on television and pulling out his scrapbook documenting the protests of the 1960s and the Friendship Nine to show them.

"I wanted to make sure they understood what was happening. They were both in integrated society, and they didn't have the same problems that we had, but things came up from time to time."

"They don't take the backseat. They're intelligent women," said Clarence, describing his daughters as "fiery."

Despite the history of protest they've inherited, they also have a sense of humor, especially in restaurants, Clarence said.

"They always tease me, 'Now Dad, don't you go in there and create no problems.'"

This story was originally published January 30, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Understanding her son's choices."