1960s civil rights protesters who staged historic sit-in finally have arrest records cleared

Source: AP

Updated 2:54 PM EDT, October 25, 2024


Simon Bouie told his mother and grandmother he wasn’t going to get in trouble back in 1960. Then the Black Benedict College student sat at a whites-only lunch counter in South Carolina and got himself arrested. Finally on Friday, that arrest and the records of six of his friends were erased as a judge signed an order during a ceremony in a Columbia courthouse just a few blocks from where he sat at that segregated table some 64 years before.

Bouie remembered that promise as he went into the Eckerd Drug Store. He knew the governor at the time had warned African American college students not to get involved with “hot-headed agitators” and “confused lawyers” who were insisting all people were equal no matter the color of their skin.

“We had a desire to fight for what was right and nobody could turn us around. We walked in that building with our heads held high and sat down,” Bouie said. Sitting down changed the world. Columbia wasn’t where the first sit-in, an act of disobedience, happened. The movement started in Greensboro, North Carolina, and spread through the South in the early 1960s.

Several Southern cities have held similar expungement ceremonies in recent years as the young people who risked arrest and marring their record are now older men and women. U.S. Rep. and one-time House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn loved to tell the story of how he met his wife of nearly six decades, Emily, in jail after they were both arrested at a protest.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/civil-rights-arrest-cleared-south-carolina-expunged-0ec16133334fd5e757c9a97e42d297cf