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An Alabama Sit-In in 1960, an Apology and the Lifetimes Between

From left, St. John Dixon, James McFadden and Joseph Peterson. They received honorary degrees from Alabama State University in 2010, but the state had never apologized for expelling them and six other students in 1960 for a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, until this month.Credit...David Campbell/Alabama State University

Just before noon, 29 black students from Alabama State College strolled into the Montgomery County Courthouse and into the basement snack room. The all-white customers were aghast — “The Negros are here!” one said — as the students crowded the restaurant, sat at the lunch counter and demanded to be served.

On that morning on Feb. 25, 1960, the students knew they were risking everything, perhaps even their lives in a defiant act in the heart of the Jim Crow South: the first known sit-in in Alabama. They were not beaten or thrown in jail, but the Alabama governor threw the book at them. He ordered nine students thought to be the ringleaders to be expelled. The rest were reprimanded.

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For 58 years, those blemishes stayed on their academic records — until this month. In an unceremonious Alabama Board of Education meeting on May 10, the interim education superintendent announced that he had cleared them.

“They represent a time in the history of the state board that must be acknowledged and never repeated,” the interim superintendent, Ed Richardson, said in a letter about the action that he read at the meeting. “I regret that it has taken 58 years to correct this injustice. I can only hope that this action will provide a modicum of comfort to the people affected.”

The board also expunged the records of four teachers at the college who were fired for “disloyalty” in the early 1960s, including Lawrence Reddick, a renowned historian, who was accused of being a Communist in 1960.

“It was their actions that allowed for us to be in this space that we are in now,” said Quinton T. Ross Jr., the president of the college, which was renamed Alabama State University, in an interview on Tuesday. “The role they played in the civil rights movement, it sends chills down your spine.”

The Alabama State students waited nearly six decades for the apology, which comes in a time of heightened sensitivity to racism. For 58 years, the expulsions clung to them through college transfer applications, job interviews and in most cases to the grave. Six of the nine are dead. The three survivors spoke to The Times this week.

“There are only a few of us who were directly involved who are still alive,” James McFadden, 78, said in an interview. “We can hear it and pass it along to the ancestors of those who are gone.”

Mr. McFadden and the two other men, Joseph Peterson and St. John Dixon, said the apology was overdue but appreciated. “I’m happy that it’s happened, but I’m not sure what to do with it,” Mr. Peterson, 83, said.

Mr. Dixon, 80, said, “It took 50 years before they said they were sorry and that they knew it was wrong.”

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Sheriff Mac Sim Butler ordering black students from Alabama State College to stand against a wall after they were removed from a segregated snack room at the Montgomery County Courthouse in February 1960.Credit...Associated Press

The three men grew up in rural Alabama towns and came to Montgomery, the capital, for college at different times.

Mr. McFadden arrived in September 1956 to find a city in upheaval. Black residents were boycotting the city buses, a protest sparked nine months before when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. On campus, he met a young Baptist minister, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who offered him a role in the movement.

Mr. McFadden agreed and started delivering leaflets from his church, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, to black residents in Montgomery. They told people where they could pick up food or find a ride to work.

Mr. Dixon came to Montgomery the following year, after the bus boycott had ended, but when Dr. King and others were organizing large demonstrations. He ate biscuits with Ms. Parks in her home and joined protests led by Dr. King.

Before one Saturday march to the Capitol, Dr. King led a prayer and cautioned those in the group who were scared. “He told us before we left the church, ‘Some of you may be afraid,’” Mr. Dixon recalled. “‘Don’t feel bad. Some of us will have to go.’”

After three years in the Army, Mr. Peterson arrived in Montgomery in the late 1950s and joined Phi Beta Sigma, a fraternity where he met the other men.

In February 1960, the fraternity members saw an opportunity to lead their own demonstration. Earlier that month, black students had sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and refused to leave. Then black college students in Nashville entered three stores and ordered food at the lunch counters.

As anxious white people across the South worried about the spread of lunch-counter protests, the Alabama governor, John M. Patterson, assured them that he had everything under control in his state. That only emboldened the students at Alabama State.

“We said, ‘We got to do what we got to do,’” Mr. Dixon recalled. “We just came together as a group.”

The men do not remember who came up with the sit-in idea, but the group chose the segregated county lunchroom because it was taxpayer funded. They adopted Dr. King’s nonviolent principles, recruiting a group of students large enough to make a statement, determined to keep the planning a secret and able to resist fighting back.

The students left campus around 11 a.m. for the courthouse, entered the lunchroom and refused to leave. The white customers panicked. The staff members cut off the lights. The police arrived within minutes.

Officers harassed them, ordered them to leave and threatened to arrest them. No one budged. They were defiant but respectful, addressing the officers as sir. After an hour, the students left on their own and walked into a hallway lined with news photographers, who snapped their photos.

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Black students from Alabama State College waiting for court to open in Montgomery in March 1960.Credit...Associated Press

“We knew that standing up strong and breaking unjust laws would get some attention, but we didn’t know how much,” Mr. McFadden said.

News of the sit-in quickly spread beyond Montgomery. The New York Times ran a wire service story about it, “Sitdown Staged in Alabama Shop,” at the top of Page 8 in the next day’s newspaper.

Dr. King also visited the men the following day. “He came to make sure we were all right,” Mr. McFadden said.

Governor Patterson erupted when he heard about the sit-in and saw the photos. He ordered the Alabama State president to reprimand all the students involved and expel the nine he believed, based on the photos, had organized it. The other expelled students were Bernard Lee, Edward E. Jones, Leon Rice, Howard Shipman, Elroy Emory and Marzette Watts.

Mr. Patterson, who is now 96, later recanted his racist past. He did not return a call seeking comment on Wednesday.

In the months after the sit-in, the three surviving participants said, the students went their separate ways.

Mr. Peterson was expelled his junior year and moved to New York City, where he sent letters to college admissions officers explaining his situation and asking for a chance to attend their school. New York University accepted him into its business school. Until he retired in the late 1990s, he was a manager for several manufacturing companies, including General Electric in Massachusetts. He returned home to Alabama in 1997.

Mr. Dixon moved to California to be near his sister and attend San Jose State University, one of the many colleges that had heard about his case and offered to accept him. After college, he joined the Service Employees International Union, helping workers who had issues with their employers.

In some ways, Mr. McFadden had the best luck of the three. He was a senior when they marched into the courthouse. The college did not officially expel him until a few hours after his final grades had been turned in. (It took 10 more years for the school to release his grades, he said.)

He stayed in Montgomery for several weeks but moved away after a judge labeled him a troublemaker. He first stopped in North Carolina, where in April 1960 he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil-rights group. He later moved to Philadelphia, where he worked in the state’s Department of Corrections and as a teacher.

Mr. McFadden sees a frightening similarity to those days, he said: the way politicians talk about and dehumanize people who are different.

“It’s the same kind of dehumanization that we received,” he said. “I’m very fearful today, almost as much today as 1960.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: An Alabama Sit-in in 1960, an Apology and the Lifetimes Between. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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