If you are too young to have lived through the civil rights era in the U.S., you probably haven’t heard of the “Friendship Nine.” They were a group of black men who, in 1961, decided to commit an illegal but nonviolent act of resistance to the odious segregation laws in South Carolina. (The name of the group came from the fact that most of them went to Friendship Junior College.)

On January 31 of that year, the group walked into a store in Rock Hill, South Carolina, sat down at a lunch counter, and ordered lunch. That was illegal: blacks were forbidden from eating in white establishments. They were arrested and convicted. The group decided, as a statement, to go to jail rather than put up bail. They served 30 days at hard labor. The signifiance of this event, which I still remember, was (according to Wikipedia), this:

“What made the Rock Hill action so timely … was that it responded to a tactical dilemma that was arising in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] discussions across the South: how to avoid the crippling limitations of scarce bail money,” wrote Taylor Branch in “Parting the Waters,” his Pulitzer Prize winning account of the Civil Rights Movement. [JAC: Branch’s book is terrific.] “The obvious advantage of ‘jail, no bail’ was that it reversed the financial burden of protest, costing the demonstrators no cash while obligating the white authorities to pay for jail space and food. The obvious disadvantage was that staying in jail represented a quantum leap in commitment above the old barrier of arrest, lock-up, and bail-out.”

During their sentence, the men refused to work several times and were put on a bread-and-water diet. All of this drew national attention to the inequities faced by blacks in the South, which ultimately led to the Civil Rights act of 1964, pushed through Congress and signed by Lyndon Johnson.

I bring this up for two reasons. First, the men’s convictions were finally overturned—two days ago, after 54 years. Over much of the interim, the men suffered from having a conviction on their record, hampering their efforts to get jobs. On Tuesday, the men’s original lawyer moved for dismissal, the current prosecutor agreed, and the judge apologized, saying,”We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history.” (See the dramatic courtroom video here.)

That brings up not only the idea of human rights, but also question of “What is the right thing to do?” Reporting on the story last night, Brian Williams of NBC News (the channel I watch) said something like this: “South Carolina did the right thing after more than 50 years.”

Who among the readers here doesn’t agree, instantly and instinctively, that clearing those men, as well as the old battles for civil rights, were indeed the right things to do? Most Americans would nod in agreement as well.

Yet when I was young, the instincts were largely the opposite, particularly in the southern United States. Segregation was seen as natural and right (indeed, it was often justified on Biblical grounds), and what the Friendship Nine did was seen as wrong and immoral: a group of people claiming a right that they didn’t have.

The instinctive feelings that we have convey a couple of lessons. First of all, they have changed dramatically over those fifty years, and almost completely among white Americans over the last century. Yet our feelings about what’s right have always seemed to come from the gut, even when those feelings change.

Francis Collins and other religionists argue that our instinctive views of right and wrong can’t be explained by science, but must have been vouchsafed by God. (Collins calls this set of feelings “the Moral Law”). But if those instincts change so drastically, and so rapidly, what does that say? It says, of course, one of two things. Either God has changed the Moral Law (which can’t be true if you’re a true believer), or that our moral instincts come not from God but from rationality, secularism, and changing circumstances.

The answer, of course, is the latter. As Peter Singer argues in his book The Expanding Circle, and Steve Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the increasing interactions between different groups of humans, and the changing tide of thought, has made us realize that nobody is privileged with a set of “rights” not shared by other humans. That is why, as Pinker documents eloquently, what humans see as “moral” has changed so much over the last several centuries.

Second, the rapid change shows that our particular feelings about right and wrong, at least in this case, cannot come from our genes. Morality about civil rights, and other things like animal rights, child labor, slavery, women’s rights, and so on, has changed too fast to be accounted for by evolution. Yes, some feelings of what is “right” probably reside in our genes (our preference for our own children and our own relatives over others, for instance), and perhaps the very notion of “right” vs. “wrong” also resides in our genes, but the particular actions and feelings that constitute right and wrong are often quite malleable.

Morality does not come from God, and most of it isn’t in our genes. It comes, I suggest, from an evolved background of having a code of behavior that enables humans to live harmoniously, on top of which is overlain the particulars of that code, which change not only as our society changes, but as our species learns what it takes to make a good society.

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Here’s a short documentary on the Friendship Nine: