Ernest Finney Jr., rights lawyer in ‘jail, not bail’ case, dies at age of 86

On Jan. 31, 1961, 10 black college students in Rock Hill, S.C., rejecting the warning of the state’s chief law enforcement officer, seated themselves at a whites-only lunch counter at the local McCrory’s five-anddime store and asked to be served.

Dragged by police from their stools, the protesters, most of them from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, were charged with breach of the peace and trespassing. They were then hauled before Judge Billy D. Hays, who gave them a choice: Either pay a $100 fine or spend 30 days shoveling sand on a York County chain gang.

For nine out of the 10 protesters, the choice was clear. They had no intention of paying fines and thus help subsidize a segregationist local government. They took the jail time (knowing it would cost the county money for room and board), and in so doing helped galvanize the fledgling civil rights movement.

By then, sit-ins at lunch counters and elsewhere had begun to spread. But the Friendship Nine, as the Rock Hill protesters came to be called, were among the first defendants to embrace an emerging strategy of resistance to legal segregation: jail, not bail.

Their strategy of embarrassing segregated Southern communities by compounding their arrest with the spectacle of being imprisoned merely for ordering lunch or sitting in the wrong section of a bus or a theater, or worshipping at an allwhite church, would be validated as the movement matured.

And their lawyer, Ernest A. Finney Jr., who had begun practicing full time only in 1960 after doubling as a teacher and working part time in a restaurant to make ends meet, would eventually be vindicated, too. As a newly minted lawyer in the mid-1950s, Finney had not been invited to the state bar association convention because he was black. He managed to eavesdrop on the proceedings all the same—but only because he was working as a waiter at the time for the Ocean Forest Hotel in Myrtle Beach, where the convention was being held.

He and his partner would later represent thousands of other civil rights defendants. Most lost their cases in South Carolina’s local trial courts. All but two, he would later recall, were absolved on appeal.

Finney went on to become South Carolina’s first black chief justice.

Fifty-four years after his clients were arrested in the McCrory’s sit-in, Finney returned to Rock Hill, a former textile mill town, to reargue their case. One of the original defendants had died, but most of the others joined him. One arrived in a wheelchair. Another walked with a cane.

By now retired at 83, Finney hobbled into the courtroom on the arm of one of his sons. He rose slowly to address Circuit Court Judge John C. Hayes III.

Wearing a tie emblazoned with the state’s palmetto and crescent moon logo, Justice Finney appealed to the court to exonerate the men, who had been sentenced in 1961 by Hayes’ uncle.

“Justice and equity demand that this motion be granted,” Finney declared.

It was. In a bittersweet rebuke to the past, the convictions were overturned. The sentences were vacated. The prosecutor apologized. “We cannot rewrite history,” Hayes said, “but we can right history.”

Finney died on Sunday in Columbia, S.C. He was 86. His daughter, Lynn C. Finney said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He lived in Sumter, S.C.