Frederick Hart at the Edwards March

Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman, Frederick Hart, and others arrested for participating in a march against racial segregation at the South Carolina State House, Columbia, South Carolina, March 2, 1961. (WIS-TV News Story 61-81. WIS-TV News Collection. University of South Carolina Civil Rights Films, Moving Image Research Collections.)

Thursday, March 2, 1961 — Inside Zion Baptist Church, two hundred African American students rally for civil rights. Twenty-five minutes after noon, the rally concludes with a hymn, and the students prepare to file out into the streets of Columbia, South Carolina.

The students are college students. They attend racially segregated schools. Seven years earlier, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against racial segregation, but in the years after the Supreme Court ruling, many white southerners responded with open defiance, and the practice of racial segregation persisted.

City and state authorities had already warned the African American students that they would not allow “mass demonstrating” in the downtown area. Civil rights demonstrators were instructed to restrict themselves to groups of fifteen, or be subject to city law. Therefore, in groups of fifteen, they emerged from Zion Baptist Church, one group at a time, and marched down the streets of Columbia. The students were mostly quiet, but some carried placards which read, “You may jail our bodies but not our souls” and “Down with segregation.”

It took the first group of students about ten minutes to walk from the church to the South Carolina State House. With its copper dome, its blue granite walls and its many columns, the State House hovered like a vast sepulcher over the grounds around it, fifteen acres of lawn criss-crossed by winding pathways scattered with a handful of trees, mainly palmettos, and a few statues.

Beyond the meagre circles of shade cast by the palmetto trees, and in the midst of the statues celebrating slave-owners and segregationists, dozens of police stood waiting. As the first group of students walked onto the State House grounds, a police lieutenant shouted, “You do not have any right to demonstrate on this property!”

At the same time, a second group of students came up the street, and stepped onto the State House grounds. As these two groups began to press toward the State House, three or four police officers ran across the grass, and placed one of the students under arrest. Even so, more and more groups of African American students kept streaming onto the State House grounds.

White passers-by noticed the demonstration, and began to form a mob across the street. Many of them were openly hostile, heckling the civil rights demonstrators. More police arrived on the scene. They ordered the remaining civil rights demonstrators to disperse, or face arrest for disorderly conduct. The students clapped and sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” Police moved in to arrest them.

From the edge of the crowd across the street emerged a skinny white seventeen-year-old with a thick mop of red-brown hair. He crossed the street, stepped onto the State House grounds, and came over to the demonstrators. The skinny white seventeen-year-old was my father, the sculptor Frederick Hart.

He was just walking by, and he happened to know a few of the demonstrators. He was friends with some of the African American students, and he went over and started talking to them, but that irritated the police, who told him to move along. Instead, Rick asked why his friends were being arrested. Then he exchanged a few heated words with the police. They asked him, “Are you a part of this demonstration?”

Rick replied, “I am now.”

The police attacked Rick and the rest of the students, cuffing them, and pushing them into police cruisers and buses. Rick saw the police grab an African American woman and drag her into a squad car by her hair. They arrested all of them, the second-largest group of civil rights demonstrators to be arrested up to that time: one hundred eighty-seven African American students, two officials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Rick.

At the jail, while waiting to be processed, a group of students recited the Lord’s Prayer. The two NAACP officials sat in the middle of the students. One of them was a Methodist pastor who as an eight-year-old witnessed the execution of an African American man at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, and for a couple of minutes, Rick and the other students listened to the pastor quote Scripture from memory. Once the pastor had been silenced, a city administrator delivered a brief angry lecture, and as Rick remembered it later, he was thrown in a jail cell alone.

In the middle of the night, three or four large white men came in. After they entered his cell, and woke him up, they just stood there, staring at him. Rick asked the men who they were, and what they wanted.

One of the men told Rick, “We’re the Ku Klux Klan.”

Another man said, “We just want to get a good look at you, boy.”

As soon as he was released from jail, Rick had to hide. He did not want to hide at a friend’s house, because he did not want to put anyone else in danger, and so he decided to hide out in a cemetery. Hoping the Klan would not think to look for him there, he continued hiding out in the cemetery for another four days. Eventually, Rick was able to make contact with his girlfriend, and have his cousin come and pick him up.

During the period of time Rick spent hiding out in the cemetery, one of the African American student-leaders from the march was stabbed. He was attacked in broad daylight, in the middle of downtown Columbia, by a group of white men. Although he recovered from his injures, the attackers were never apprehended.

The local newspaper portrayed Rick and the two NAACP officials as “agitators,” Rick was expelled from school, and while neither he nor the NAACP officials were ever charged, the African American students were charged and convicted of committing a breach of the peace. They were fined and given jail sentences of ten to thirty days. With the assistance of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the students appealed the case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Led by James Edwards, one of the first students to be arrested that day, the students insisted that their participation in the “Edwards March” was a constitutionally protected effort to assemble and petition the state authorities for redress of grievances. The Supreme Court issued its decision in Edwards v. South Carolina. On the basis of their constitutional rights to assemble and petition the government, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of all the students. The Court’s decision in Edwards not only exonerated the students, it became an important foundation for the way in which the Court was able to interpret the First Amendment to protect civil rights and anti-war demonstrators throughout the 1960s and 1970s.