One year after the sit-in movement that began at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 and spread to other cities, stimulating the nation’s conscience over racial segregation, was in danger of losing momentum. In Rock Hill, S.C., local businesses still refused to integrate, despite the sit-ins, and local news no longer covered them. Then, in 1961, a 22-year-old organizer, Thomas Gaither, introduced a new tactic. In the next sit-in, at the lunch counter of a McCrory’s dime store in Rock Hill, Black students led by Gaither were dragged off counter stools by police officers. But this time, instead of paying a $100 trespassing fine as earlier protesters did, they chose to serve 30-day sentences on the county chain gang. Their “jail no bail” tactic dramatized their moral commitment and changed the direction of the civil rights movement. Within days, protesters in other cities followed suit, their imprisoning drawing more attention and protests. The choice of jail, historian Taylor Branch wrote in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988), was “an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement” because it dramatized protesters’ willingness to pay a real price for their convictions.
A little-sung catalyst of the civil rights protests of the 1960s, Gaither was one of the activists who, driven by high moral purpose, peacefully put their bodies on the line to fight racial discrimination. Those actions helped bring about historic federal laws to end legal segregation and ensure voting rights.
At Claflin College, an all-Black institution in Orangeburg, S.C., he was president of the youth chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In March 1960, he was co-leader of a march of 1,000 students protesting segregated businesses. The peaceful Orangeburg marchers were attacked with fire hoses and tear gas, leading to 388 arrests. Many were held in a stockade meant for cattle, where they sang “God Bless America.”
As a field secretary by the Congress of Racial Equality, which used nonviolent direct action to fight segregation, Gaither was sent to organize in Kentucky, California, and Arizona. Ahead of the “jail no bail” sit-in in Rock Hill, on January 31, 1961, he helped train the protesters, eight students from Friendship Junior College. He and the students were known as the Friendship Nine after choosing to serve jail sentences. “The amazing thing about the Friendship Nine,” he added, “was that we took essentially a group of college students who had no knowledge at all of tactical nonviolence and we pulled off one of the most important protest events of the movement.”
Several months later, Gaither and fellow CORE organizer Gordon Carey both read a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent protest, and developed the idea for the first Freedom Ride: an integrated group of activists who would take a bus trip from Washington through the Deep South. The idea was to dramatize the refusal of Southern states to comply with US Supreme Court rulings that segregated interstate buses and terminals were unconstitutional. In May 1961, CORE national director James Farmer led the first Freedom Ride, with 13 white and Black passengers, including the future congressman and civil rights advocate John Lewis.
In Alabama, the CORE activists were arrested and beaten by white mobs led by the Ku Klux Klan. The commercial buses they rode in were firebombed. The police abetted the violence, and hospitals refused to treat bloodied victims. National publicity drew hundreds more activists, who made dozens of Freedom Rides crisscrossing the South through 1961. The violence shocked the nation, no less because of the complicity of the Southern authorities in allowing it to happen in defense of Jim Crow laws.
Gaither was not on the original Freedom Ride in May 1961; he was scouting the route and contacting local supporters to house the riders. He was staying at the home of the civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 20 when riders arriving at the Greyhound station there were beaten with baseball bats and iron pipes. The next night, more than 1,500 people went to Abernathy’s church to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak as a rock-throwing white mob surrounded the building. Dr. King called on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to send federal protection.
He later became a professor of biology in 1968 at Slippery Rock University (Pennsylvania), and taught there for 38 years before retiring in 2007.
In his later years, Gaither felt that the civil rights movement had profoundly changed America, but also that the structures of racism had remained in his native South. “No question, the South has changed tremendously,” he said in 2011. “But the fundamental infrastructure of racism and segregation that called the shots in the South in 1960 are still in place. They have slightly different labels, they accomplish their goals by slightly different means, but there has been no real fundamental shift in who really calls the signals.”
Read the January 24, 2025 New York Times obituary.
Listen to a 2011 Library of Congress Oral History Interview with Thomas Gaither.
