TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES -- By 1960, Montgomery had already been rocked by the bus boycott of 1955 and white citizens across the nation were reeling from the Supreme Court’s decision to integrate the country’s public schools a year prior.

Change was coming, and for some, that was satisfyingly inevitable. On Feb. 25, 60 years ago a group of Alabama State College students sought to push things further, becoming the change makers themselves.

Fed up with the indignities of segregation and the abuse black citizens were forced to endure under the tremendous weight of injustice, 29 courageous students became the first to hold a sit-in demonstration to protest Jim Crow laws in Alabama.

Six decades later, Cornelius Benson, St. John Dixon, James McFadden, Joe Peterson, and Joe Reed — now in their 80s — will return to Alabama State University on Monday to relive the moments that would later change the course of history.

Like many Americans, the men had been following civil rights litigation and demonstrations across the country with a passionate sense of urgency.

Sit-in protests had been executed by black citizens as early as 1939, but for the college students at Alabama State the massive student-coordinated actions they witnessed in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville in early February solidified for them that the time for action was now.

“The sit-in movement conveyed to America that we [students] were impatient with the snail like pace of litigation,” said Joe Reed, father of Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed and one of 20 students who was later suspended for taking part in the Montgomery demonstration.

“We were unwilling to just wait,” he said. Reed would go on to marshal that impatience to the benefit of black teachers at the Alabama State Teachers Association four years later as the organization’s executive secretary — ironically known for his eagerness to take segregationists to court.

The atmosphere on campus was electric. Professor Jo Ann Robinson and Mary Fair Burks were founding members of the Women’s Political Council and had been the first to call for a bus boycott after the arrest of Rosa Parks.

James McFadden, who was just 20 years old when he took place in the sit-in protests, had been a student organizer for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at that time. He and other students delivered leaflets that explained what black residents should do and where they should go.

And although faculty members could not openly endorse political actions or protest movements, their revolutionary spirit inspired students to act.

“If you're taught by Mary Fair Burks and Jo Ann Robinson, and L.D. Reddick and Rufus Lewis, I'm not surprised that these students were not going to just resign themselves to a subjugated, segregated life,” said Derryn Moten, chair of ASU’s history and political science department.

“They were instructed that they were entitled to full citizenship rights just like any other American,” he said. “And they were absolutely determined” to get them.

It’s unclear which of the students first promoted the idea of a Montgomery sit-in, but word travels fast around a college campus. Soon groups of students were holding meetings at churches that had been sympathetic to protesters during the bus boycott, and planning ways to get the word out. Whisper networks, where one person told 10 others and each one told 10 more, were created.

While the previous sit-ins had challenged private businesses, the students were advised by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a former Alabama State faculty member and president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, along with civil rights attorney Fred Gray and Professor Robinson that it was most wise to take action on public state property — where every taxpayer’s dollars contributed.

The Montgomery County Courthouse lunch counter would become their stage, and all the world was invited to watch the show.

Sixty or so students had shown interest in the lead-up, but on the day of the demonstration only half had shown. Those that arrived were steadfast.

“We weren't sure exactly what was going to happen to us,” McFadden said, “but we knew it could be anything from being dehumanized to being beaten, to losing our lives.

"We were willing to do whatever it cost to get justice.”

Neatly dressed, so they couldn’t be turned away for appearing “undesirable,” the 29 discreetly filed into the courthouse separating into two groups, each one entering through a different doorway so as not to attract attention.

When the men took their seats at the lunch counter, the restaurant’s white patrons became incensed.

People all around them scrambled to move away while they hurled expletives and derogatory remarks at the college students. When a white woman who Reed sat next to looked up from her dish and saw his brown face, she jumped in shock, before quickly scurrying away.

“All of sudden the Caucasian people started screaming, ‘The Negroes are here, the Negroes are here,’ within minutes they had about 15 or 20 police in there,” said St. John Dixon. Then a college sophomore, he had grown up in the country, less than 80 miles north of Mobile.

The men were ordered out of the restaurant and into the hallway where they were lined up for what felt like an eternity while the authorities decided what to do with them.

To their surprise, they were released and returned to campus where they held a rally that evening informing the students of Alabama State of their actions. They had no idea of their forthcoming punishment; it would be exercised through politics.

Gov. John Patterson, a staunch segregationist, had long kept his “eyes and ears” on what the students were up to at Alabama State. He created a list of the student “offenders,” nine of whom were labeled as organizers, and ordered President Harper Councill Trenholm to expel them or risk losing government funding for the state college. The remaining 20 were to be placed on suspension. Trenholm had no choice but to concede.

McFadden, Dixon and Peterson were three of those nine students expelled — the majority were from out-of-state. The president’s last-ditch effort to help the students was delaying their expulsions by a few days so they could finish the semester, earning full credit for the term.

Trenholm himself would later meet a similar fate. In November 1961, the State Board of Education placed him on administrative leave, essentially terminating his job. Jo Ann Robinson, Mary Fair Burks, and L.D. Reddick would also lose their positions, along with music instructor Robert Williams. While many of the students’ parents lost their jobs or were denied work because their sons had been labeled “agitators.”

The following month, things escalated even further when the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools pulled the college’s accreditation. In 1962, the same scenario played out at Alabama A&M under President Joseph Drake.

“In a one-year period both public black colleges in Alabama lost their accreditation,” said Moten.

It was no coincidence.

The Alabama State students would eventually emerge triumphant, to the benefit of college students across the country.

Attorney Gray took their case all the way to the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans with the aid of Thurgood Marshall, who became the first African American Supreme Court Judge, Derrick Bell, the first black tenured law professor at Harvard, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director Jack Greenberg. They challenged that the state had violated the students’ rights when it expelled them without a hearing and without due cause in the case of St. John Dixon v. Alabama in 1961.

The court sided with the students and the ruling became a landmark case, ending the rights of colleges and universities to act “in loco parentis,” or in place of parents, to discipline or expel students. It is known as the "leading case on due process for students in higher education."

In 2010, to mark the 50th anniversary of the courthouse sit-in, ASU presented the remaining men with their degrees.

It would take the State Board 58 years to acknowledge its action against Alabama State’s students, faculty and campus. But for some of the surviving members of the 1960 sit-in, talk is cheap.

McFadden, who went on to become a civil rights organizer in Philadelphia after he was told by an Alabama judge that he should leave the city because his “life wasn’t protected,” said he has seen little change in the state’s actions; citing the disparity in funding between the University of Alabama and Alabama State.

ASU will hold a three-day event series examining the legacy of these students’ heroic demonstration, including a panel discussion at 2 p.m. Monday where the men will share their stories; as well as a panel on reconciliation at 9:20 a.m. Wednesday moderated by The Rev. Manuel Williams of Resurrection Catholic Church that will feature Moten, Mayor Reed, the Montgomery County Commissioner, the state superintendent of education, and a representative from the governor’s Office of Minority Affairs.

“We need to reconcile what happened to this campus,” said Moten.

“Until you reconcile a wrong you can’t begin to make amends, and the state of Alabama has to reconcile this wrong, along with many, many other wrongs committed in 1960, after 1960 and before 1960.”

©2020 the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.)

Visit the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.) at www.montgomeryadvertiser.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.