Two Young Leaders

Thomas Walter Gaither

Julie Varner Wright

Julie Varner Wright, with the NAACP, admires the “Jim Crow Must Go” tie of Thomas Walter Gaither, of the Congress of Racial Equality. Photo by Cecil J. Williams. Courtesy of Cecil J. Williams

Thomas Walter Gaither

At first, Thomas Walter Gaither saw nonviolence as compliance, as the behavior he had witnessed among black elders of his childhood and had disavowed. That’s what he told Rev. Glenn E. Smiley, a white Methodist preacher and pacifist, who spoke at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Smiley belonged to both the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a Chicago-founded interracial group that had held sit-ins since the 1950s, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international peace organization founded in 1914. In Montgomery, Alabama, Smiley tutored the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in nonviolent resistance during the 1955 bus boycott.

Gaither told Smiley, after hearing him promote nonviolence, “That’s precisely why we are in the predicament we are in.” However, Gaither also read Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer and The Gandhi Reader by Homer A. Jack, a CORE co-founder. The leader of India’s successful nonviolent resistance of Great Britain’s rule, Mohandas Gandhi practiced satyagraha, or holding onto truth, sometimes translated as “soul power.” Gandhi distinguished satyagraha from passive resistance, which he understood as “a weapon of the weak” that could be characterized by hatred and eventually devolve into violence. Satyagraha included civil disobedience and the overlapping refusal to submit to injustice. 

Inspired by the February 1, 1960 sit-ins held in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gaither led plans to bring sit-ins to Orangeburg. Groups of thirty to forty students each from Claflin and next-door South Carolina State College met several times to study CORE Rules for Action and Cracking the Color Line, a 34-page booklet describing CORE’s successful desegregation of restaurants, theaters, and swimming pools in the 1940s and 1950s. They also studied King’s Stride Toward Freedom, his 1958 memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott. 

Gaither called on James Thomas “Nooker” McCain, CORE’s first field secretary based in the South. McCain, a founding member and initial chairman of the NAACP in Sumter, his hometown, had lost SC posts as an educator because of his support of the NAACP and desegregation. He joined CORE in 1957 and travelled the South — 50 weeks a year for $35 a week - coaching voter registration. The sit-ins forced a new focus, his work turning to teaching young people nonviolent direct action. McCain instructed the Orangeburg students in the philosophy of nonviolence and led them through “socio-dramas,” during which students acted out possible attacks and their responses.

On February 25, Gaither and other youths led Orangeburg’s first organized sit-in. About forty-five Claflin and SC State students left their campuses in groups of three or four, taking different routes but all headed to Kress. The students hoped to escape the notice of campus police, who would warn officials downtown. They wanted to surprise store employees. About fifteen students walked into Kress and sat on lunch-counter stools. After the first group sat for fifteen minutes, employees posted signs saying the counter was closed.

The initial wave of students left, and another group of about twenty students took their seats. White customers doused them with mustard and ketchup. Some of the white people assembling carried weapons, such as large knives, that they brandished. A woman walked behind those sitting, tapping a baseball bat against the floor. Others blew smoke from their cigarettes on the students.

No one was arrested. Several white men attacked one student, bashing him about the head, but he wasn’t seriously injured. In the following days, stores closed their counters and only allowed inside two black customers at a time.

That was okay. Gaither and others were planning something bigger, much bigger. Hundreds were training for a mass demonstration.

On March 1, hundreds of students marched downtown. Again, no one was arrested. No one was injured.  Jet magazine called the quiet, orderly march the “Funeral Procession of the Week.”

On March 15, as many as 1,000 marched. Gaither had applied for a permit, which was denied. “Part of the nonviolence philosophy is you always reveal what you’re going to do,” explained Gaither. This time, law enforcement officers lobbed tear gas at students. Firefighters turned fire hoses’ high-pressure water on them. Students hit by the water bled from their ears, slammed into buildings, fell to their knees. The water pressure pushed a blind coed and a male student fewer than four feet tall down a street as if they were swept downriver. Men trained fire hoses on individuals, breaking one woman’s kneecap, knocking three teeth out of another woman’s mouth.

Law officers ordered around 350 of the approximately 500 arrested into an open-air stockade adjoining the county jail. Newspapers throughout the nation published photographs of the neatly dressed students -- the men in ties and overcoats, the women in church hats and coats – penned within ten-foot-tall chain-link fencing. Gaither said it was a freezing 28 degrees, following a March 13 all-time low in Columbia of 24 degrees. Police prohibited shivering students, stuck in the stockade for four cold hours, from accepting dry clothes and blankets that supporters stripped from dorm rooms and tossed over the fences. 

Gaither, now chairman of the Orangeburg branch of the SC Student Movement Association, wrote about the protest and arrests in a CORE publication, Sit-Ins: The Students Report, and protested the use of fire hoses during a May meeting of the SC Advisory Committee on Civil Rights.

Upon his graduation in May 1960, Gaither joined his mentor McCain, becoming a CORE field secretary. He believed the NAACP strategy of finding petitioners and pursuing lawsuits limited participation, took too long, and didn’t demand the moral choices of satyagraha. For CORE, Gaither helped design new strategies. He led the beginning of “jail, no bail,” in which arrested students took the risk of staying in jail to cost the system, and he mapped the original route of the May 4-16, 1961 Freedom Ride and secured safe houses as the rides continued.

Read more about Thomas Gaither and the Orangeburg Student Movement xxxxxxxx

Julie Varner Wright

The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the cornfield next to the Varner’s Summerville home. The house’s floor-to-ceiling windows exposed the family, and Mildred Collins Varner would push her children behind the sofa to hide them from the hooded men and shield them from rocks or bricks or gunfire that might hit the house her architect father had built.

As a child, Julie Varner saw contradictions everywhere. Her father, John Varner, owned a grocery store, and she bristled when he responded with a humble “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to white men. Her father’s twin, James Varner, cut white men’s hair, and those customers prohibited any other black men in the barber shop. “I couldn’t understand the duality,” she said. In the local drugstore, she tried more than once to take a counter seat and order a fountain soda, only to be told to move along. As a teen she was kicked out for demanding service.

She pondered the hate she witnessed and experienced daily and concluded that emotion betrayed a lack of understanding. She decided that she was needed, that God had given her special talents she could use to work against segregation.

But the KKK’s presence served as her true call to action. “And if anything started me thinking about fighting for freedom it was..those incidences where we had to really run for cover,” she told Rebecca Dominguez-Karimi during a 2008 oral history interview.

So she had long given thought to racism by the time she enrolled at Claflin University in 1957. While she had married at 17 and born a daughter in eleventh grade, Julie Varner Wright finished high school and attended college because her parents cared for her daughter and her church helped her pay tuition and expenses. She also worked for a social sciences professor during her Claflin tenure and led the NAACP youth council, but her focus stayed on academics.

A straight-A student, Wright caught the interest of the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1958, when the local newspaper celebrated her academic success, publishing a photo of the light-skinned young woman. USC assumed she was a white student connected to white professors at Claflin and invited her to apply for admission. That interest ended when Wright showed up for an interview with the Rev. Isaiah DeQuincey Newman, field secretary for the state NAACP.

“The NAACP wanted me to fight it, and my mother and father didn’t want it,” said Wright. She declined to sue because her parents insisted the cost to her family would be too high. “When you make that kind of decision, you impact yourself and your whole family.” The rejection and the decision not to fight the racial discrimination hurt. “This cemented my desire to fight for freedom,” said Hunter.

In the 1930s, the national NAACP began its fight against segregation through black petitioners seeking access to graduate and professional schools then suing when denied admission because of race. A series of lawsuits included Murray v. Pearson, in 1936, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, in 1938; Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Regents, in 1948; and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents and Sweatt v. Painter, in 1950. South Carolina took a turn with Wrighten v. Board of Trustees, in 1947. That lawsuit resulted not in desegregation of the USC School of Law but in a segregated and underfunded law school at SC State College, which adjoined Claflin.

Wright completed college in three years. Her father’s schooling had ended in fifth grade, her mother’s after one year of college, and she wanted them proud of their firstborn. Her first organized protest experience, picketing downtown Orangeburg drugstores, occurred when the white professor who employed her encouraged not only Wright but his entire class to protest segregation. On March 15, 1960, Hunter found herself in Columbia’s Central Correctional Institute when mass arrests during the 1,000-strong Orangeburg march resulted in some students being bused to the state prison. She and others were released the following day without charges being filed.

Wright believed some black leaders didn’t directly or effectively address segregation, and she couldn’t leave her own future “to just anybody.” That motivated her to seek the part she needed to play. She chose recruiting other young people to the NAACP. Its youth and college councils began in 1935-1936, under the direction of Walter White, NAACP executive secretary until 1955, and Juanita E. White, the first youth secretary. (Neither was related to Julie Wright.)

Julie Wright objected to CORE encouraging direct action without the funds to get students out of jail. She believed the NAACP’s commitment to using court cases to end segregation could be hampered by the costly legal defense of sit-in participants from other organizations. So she not only took a job with the NAACP but sometimes opposed CORE’s tactics.

Upon her graduation in May 1960, Wright worked in South Carolina and then throughout the South as a youth field secretary. She was supervised by Ruby Hurley, who served as national youth secretary from 1943 to 1952 then became director of the Southeast regional branch of the NAACP. The two were among very few women in NAACP leadership positions.

Wright’s work demanded courage — repeatedly.

During one of many NAACP attempts to desegregate state parks, she survived a lynch mob. On August 30, 1960, Newman, three other NAACP officers, several youth council members, and a white married couple attempted to desegregate Myrtle Beach State Park. Law enforcement officers, expecting them, blocked the three cars and barricaded the park entrance. After a fruitless wait, the activists left. Wright, Newman, and the couple, Judith and Gerald Friedberg, spent the night at Atlantic Beach, an all-black SC resort. The next morning, as the four drove through the town of Conway, police arrested Newman for speeding. At the Myrtle Beach jail, Newman paid bail for himself and Gerald Friedberg, a Cornell University student. The jailer allowed Wright and Judith Friedberg, a Harvard student, to sit in the jail’s waiting room.

A mob gathered outside.

Evidently, the jailer didn’t want murders on his watch. Expecting the 75-100 white men wouldn’t harm the two women — one white, one appearing white — he escorted them out the front door and away. He instructed the two men to leave from a back door. All managed to leave Conway unharmed, although Newman, escorted by police only to the Horry County line, found himself afterward tailed by some of the mob. A wild chase, with Newman driving more than 100 mph, ensued. By Florence County, Newman finally outdistanced the pursuers.

In 1961, Wright walked alone into a jail in Santee, South Carolina, assigned to investigate the suspicious death of a black man active in voter registration. Jailers showed Wright the prisoner’s naked body. Supposedly, he had strangled himself by a belt attached to a bunk rail. “But he was too tall,” said Wright. During the ordeal, she thought, “Julie, where did you get that self-confidence that if you asked a police officer to see a body, he would let you?” She kept working because “Everybody ought to have a right to live.”

In Mississippi, Wright often accompanied Medgar Evers, that state’s NAACP field secretary since 1954. They would ride many miles down dark country roads without car lights, intending to reduce the risk of being recognized and attacked. On one call to the courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, law enforcement officers set dogs on Evers and Wright when they approached the marble steps. The two turned and ran for their car. Evers pushed Wright into the car. The dogs raked his back when he lunged within.

On June 12, 1963, Evers was murdered, shot in the back as he walked from his car to his house. Twice, all-white juries deadlocked over the guilt or innocence of Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the White Citizens Council (WCC) accused of Evers’ assassination. In 1994, new evidence led to a third trial and Beckwith’s conviction.

The year Evers died, Wright left her NAACP post, and in 1964, began graduate school at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.