Tepper Sports & Entertainment celebrates Black History Month with speaker from Rock Hill’s Friendship 9

The Carolina Panthers and Charlotte FC celebrated Black History Month with a special speaker at Bank of America Stadium on Thursday.

David Williamson spoke to Tepper Sports & Entertainment staff about his experience as one of the Friendship 9, a group of students that held a lunch-counter protest in Rock Hill in 1961.

The protest was inspired by the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins from the prior year and was meant to advocate for change as dining establishments refused services to those in the black community because of segregation policies.

“The biggest thing was to draw attention,” Williamson said. “We know, as African-Americans, we go to the places where you work, we could cook for you and put it on the table, but we couldn’t sit down and eat with you. By going to the restaurant, we wanted to be able to draw attention, and hoped that would open eyes to other things. It was only the beginning.”

Williamson had attended Friendship Junior College and was aware of other civil rights protests around the area. But on the morning of January 31, 1961, when one of his classmates asked him to join the group, he was caught off guard but didn’t think twice.

“I didn’t wake up that day planning to go to jail,” Williamson said. “But it was the right thing to do. They challenged me to join them, and I wasn’t going to say no.”