The sit-in movement that began at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 and soon spread to other cities, pricking the nation’s conscience over racial segregation, was in danger of losing momentum one year later.
In Rock Hill, S.C., local businesses still refused to integrate, despite the sit-ins. The 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 him 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 incarceration drawing more attention and protests.
The choice of jail, the historian Taylor Branch wrote in “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” was “an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement” because it dramatized protesters’ willingness to pay a real price for their convictions.
Mr. Gaither, who went on to play an important role in the 1961 Freedom Rides, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Prospect, Pa., north of Pittsburgh, his family said. He was 86.
A little-sung catalyst of the civil rights protests of the 1960s, Mr. Gaither was one of a legion of activists who, driven by high moral purpose, peacefully put their bodies on the line to fight racial discrimination, actions that 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 some 1,000 students protesting segregated businesses. His fellow leader, Charles McDew, was enrolled at nearby South Carolina State College, also historically Black; he went on to be chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a national civil rights group.
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.”
After he graduated in May 1960, Mr. Gaither was hired as a field secretary by the Congress of Racial Equality, which used nonviolent direct action to fight segregation.
CORE sent Mr. Gaither to organize in Kentucky, California and Arizona. Ahead of the “jail no bail” sit-in in Rock Hill, on Jan. 31, 1961, he helped train the protesters, eight students from Friendship Junior College. He and the students became known as the “Friendship Nine” after opting to serve jail sentences.
“I felt that there should be more perhaps of a commitment on our part — being willing to suffer for something that we really wanted to have happen,” Mr. Gaither said in a 2011 oral history of the civil rights movement.
“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, Mr. Gaither and a fellow CORE organizer, Gordon Carey, were stranded in a snowstorm on the New Jersey Turnpike on a bus headed to CORE’s office in New York City.
With hours to kill, they both read a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent protest, and tossed around ways to keep the momentum of the sit-ins going. They hatched 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 Supreme Court rulings that segregated interstate buses and terminals were unconstitutional.
“We sat there and planned, the two of us, most of the Freedom Ride on that bus before we ever got back to New York City,” Mr. Carey, who was white, recalled in a 1985 interview.
James Farmer, CORE’s director, seized on the idea.
“Jim Farmer was looking for a project, and this is one that had the potential to be very successful,” Mr. Gaither said in the oral history. “I don’t think that we estimated how big it would become, because I think it ultimately was one of the signature protests of the entire civil rights movement.”
In May 1961, Mr. Farmer led the first Freedom Ride, with 13 white and Black passengers, including the future congressman and civil rights figure 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.
Mr. Gaither was not on the original Freedom Ride of May 1961; CORE had assigned him to scout the route and contact local supporters to house the riders. He was staying at the home of the civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy in Montgomery, Ala., 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. Gaither moved on to Jackson, Miss., the destination for hundreds of Freedom Riders through the summer, where they were arrested and — adopting the jail-no-bail strategy — sent to the state penitentiary known as Parchman Farm.
Thomas Walter Gaither was born on Nov. 12, 1938, in rural Great Falls, S.C., one of five children of Walter B. and Fannie (Little) Gaither. His parents met as students at Friendship Junior College. Both were initially schoolteachers, but his father was fired when he confronted a white school board member who was pocketing $5 a month from his salary, Mr. Gaither said in the oral history. Walter Gaither became a brick mason.
Thomas’s mother, he recalled, was “very strong in her insistence that we not get involved in things that took us off the path to going to college and to getting an education.”
He graduated as valedictorian of Great Falls High School and won a $75 yearly scholarship to Claflin College (now Claflin University).
In 1962, after the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides had passed into history, he entered graduate school at Clark Atlanta University to avoid the military draft, where he earned a masters in biology. He earned a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Iowa.
Dr. Gaither became a professor of biology in 1968 at Slippery Rock University, in western Pennsylvania, and taught there for 38 years. He retired in 2007. He was married for 58 years to Diane (Jenner) Gaither, a mental health therapist, who died in 2021.
He is survived by his sons T. Kenn and Edmund Andre Gaither; five grandchildren; his brothers, Herman and Edmund Barry Gaither; and his sisters, Glenda Davis and Diane Gaither Thompson.
In his later years, Dr. Gaither recognized 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.”
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