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BumRushDaShow

(143,383 posts)
Fri Oct 25, 2024, 04:27 PM Oct 25

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

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1960s civil rights protesters who staged historic sit-in finally have arrest records cleared (Original Post) BumRushDaShow Oct 25 OP
That IS good news. I remember seeing the Woolworth Counter (another famous sit-in) that was moved to The Smithstonian electric_blue68 Oct 25 #1
"(probably Museum of American History)." BumRushDaShow Oct 25 #2
Ah, good! If/When I finaally visit DC again; I definitely want to go to that museum. electric_blue68 Oct 25 #3

electric_blue68

(18,418 posts)
1. That IS good news. I remember seeing the Woolworth Counter (another famous sit-in) that was moved to The Smithstonian
Fri Oct 25, 2024, 07:19 PM
Oct 25

(probably Museum of American History).

I felt History wafting around me as I viewed it!

BumRushDaShow

(143,383 posts)
2. "(probably Museum of American History)."
Fri Oct 25, 2024, 08:06 PM
Oct 25

The National Museum of African American History and Culture (one of the newest Smithsonian museums) has an interactive "replica" version too. I saw the exhibit when I was down there in 2018.





https://www.lenzyruffin.com/blog/2017/1/7/greensboro-lunch-counter-exhibit-at-the-nmaahc

electric_blue68

(18,418 posts)
3. Ah, good! If/When I finaally visit DC again; I definitely want to go to that museum.
Fri Oct 25, 2024, 08:34 PM
Oct 25

Read all about it on line.

I haven't been to DC since Prs Obama's 2nd Inauguration, and it opened in Sept 2016.

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