Friendship College — The College Whose Students Chose the Jail, Then Lost the College

Summary

Friendship College, in Rock Hill, South Carolina — founded on October 12, 1891 by Black Baptists as a school for eleven pupils in the pews of Mt. Prospect Baptist Church — filed for bankruptcy and closed in December 1981, ninety years old, its last enrollment listed at 368. It died the way most small Black colleges of its kind died: not of scandal but of arithmetic, a tuition-dependent junior college with no endowment, a shrinking enrollment, and debts it could no longer service, in a region and an era that had built public alternatives the private Black school had once been the only substitute for. After the doors closed, fire took the buildings, and the campus on the city's east side was razed to bare ground. What had been a ninety-year-old institution became a fenced lot and a sign.

The arithmetic is the smaller part of the story. Friendship College's name belongs to American history for a single month in 1961, when its students walked into the segregated McCrory's five-and-dime on Main Street, sat at the whites-only lunch counter, and — convicted of trespass — refused to pay the fine. Ten were arrested; nine chose thirty days of hard labor at the York County Prison Farm over bail, eight of them Friendship students, the ninth a Congress of Racial Equality field secretary named Thomas Gaither. Their choice revived a tactic that had flickered in Nashville the year before and gave it a name that spread across the South: "jail, no bail." The Friendship Nine turned a county prison farm into a national argument, and the movement followed them into the cells.

So the institution that closed in 1981 was, in the ledger of what America lost, two things at once. It was a working-class Black college that for ninety years had supplied the preachers, the schoolteachers, and the strivers of upcountry South Carolina with the education the state would not give them — a place that taught grades one through fourteen because for its first decades there was no public schooling for Black children in Rock Hill at all. And it was the seedbed of one of the bravest small acts of the civil-rights movement, the college whose students were willing to go to jail and stay there. The first identity earned it a community's devotion; the second earned it a place in the textbooks. Neither could pay the bills, and the cruelty particular to this file is the contrast: a college that gave its students the nerve to choose imprisonment over compromise could not secure its own survival. The Friendship Nine outlived their school by decades — in 2015 a judge vacated their convictions, declaring that history could be set right — but the college that made them was by then thirty-four years gone, its ground cleared, its memory kept by an alumni association and a Baptist congregation raising money for a community center where the classrooms had been.

Timeline

A Church's School for a People the State Would Not Teach

Friendship College was, before it was anything else, a remedy for an absence. When Black Baptists from the York and Chester County Sunday School conventions gathered eleven pupils in Mt. Prospect Baptist Church in October 1891, they were not supplementing a public-school system; they were substituting for one that did not exist. Rock Hill, like most of the segregated South, provided little or no schooling for Black children, and what the Reverend Mansel P. Hall began in a sanctuary had to be everything at once — a grammar school, a normal school to make teachers, a place to train the preachers the founding conventions wanted. That is why a "college" taught first grade. For its first decades Friendship was the floor beneath an entire community's literacy, and it carried that obligation in its structure long after public schools arrived: elementary, secondary, and collegiate divisions stacked on one campus.

The school grew on devotion and very little money. Enrollment reached about two hundred by the mid-1890s and three hundred by 1908; in 1906 it was chartered as Friendship Normal and Industrial College, the "normal and industrial" naming the era's twin promises to Black students — teaching and the trades. Its golden age, such as a poor school is allowed one, came under James A. Goudlock, whose presidency spanned some forty-one years and who organized the institution into the three-tiered school that generations of Rock Hill remembered: children in the lower grades, teenagers in the high school, and young adults in a two-year junior college of teacher preparation and liberal arts. Friendship was never rich, never large, never accredited into the front rank; it was something more local and more necessary — a community college in the truest sense, owned by its churches and staffed by its own graduates, where the Black families of the upcountry sent their children to be made into teachers and tradesmen and churchmen, decade after decade, because it was theirs and because it was there. The students who would make history in 1961 were the products of exactly this: a college that had taught their parents and grandparents, and that had bred into a small upcountry city the expectation that Black children would be educated whether or not the law wished it.

The Month the Students Went to Jail

By 1961 the sit-in movement was a year old and financially exhausting. Across the South, students who sat at segregated counters were arrested, and the civil-rights organizations bled money posting their bail. The students of Friendship Junior College, organized with the help of CORE field secretary Thomas Gaither — himself a recent student leader at nearby Claflin College — proposed to break the cycle. On January 31, 1961, they sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at McCrory's on Main Street and were arrested for trespass. Convicted the next day and offered the customary choice — a $100 fine or thirty days of hard labor — nine of the ten refused to pay. Eight were Friendship students; the ninth was Gaither. They went to the York County Prison Farm and served the sentence, hard labor, solitary, and short rations included.

The refusal was the point. "Jail, no bail" had been debated within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and tried tentatively in Nashville in 1960, but Rock Hill made it real and made it spread: nine men who would not let anyone buy their freedom, denying the segregated court its fines and the bail bondsmen their fees, and forcing the cost of injustice back onto the system that imposed it. SNCC understood at once what the students had done, and dispatched four of its own — Diane Nash, Charles Sherrod, Ruby Doris Smith, and Charles Jones — to be arrested and refuse bail in solidarity; the women went to the county jail, the men to the prison farm alongside the students. The tactic became doctrine, carried into Freedom Rides and jails across the South. A Black junior college the wider world had never heard of had given the movement one of its sharpest instruments — and had done so out of the courage of its own students, teenagers formed in an institution that had been refusing the limits set for it since 1891. The sit-in was, in that sense, the college expressing itself: a school founded in defiance of educational exclusion producing students who defied exclusion at a lunch counter. The college gave them the conviction; they gave the college a permanent place in the record of how segregation was broken.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The students of Friendship's final years scattered into whatever schools would take their credits, with none of the orderly transfer arrangements a planned teach-out provides; the bankruptcy that ended the college ended their enrollment in it, and the published record preserves the institution's debts far better than its students' landings. The faculty and staff of a ninety-year-old school lost their work in a single bankrupt season. And Rock Hill lost an institution older than almost anything else its Black community had built — a school that had taught the city's grandparents and sent the Friendship Nine to jail and into history, now reduced to cleared land kept by an alumni association and the Baptist church beside it, which has campaigned to raise a community education center bearing President Goudlock's name on the ground where the college stood.

The civil-rights legacy fared better than the college that produced it. The McCrory's where the Friendship Nine sat down survived and became a restaurant that preserved the lunch counter, the stools restored and the nine men's names etched where they sat; a state historical marker stands on Main Street, and a "jail, no bail" exhibit keeps the documents. In 2015, more than half a century after the arrests, a judge in Rock Hill vacated the men's convictions, telling the courtroom, "We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history" — a redemption they lived to see. The college that gave them the courage to be convicted was by then thirty-four years gone. The lasting mark of Friendship College is therefore split in two: the movement remembers the students, and Rock Hill remembers the school, but the institution that joined them survives only in the record of what it was and what it dared.

Lessons

References

• Friendship College Wikipedia
• Friendship Nine Wikipedia
• Friendship College Lost Colleges
• Rock Hill Sit-ins and Jail-No-Bail SNCC Digital Gateway
• Remembering HBCU: Friendship Junior College HBCU Campaign Fund