Full Text of the Excerpt

LYNN HAESSLY:

And it was the boys rather than girls?

HARVEY B. GANTT:

Well, there were women but the men led that actually. Anyway, that happened and it turned out to be a positive result. We were not locked up in a jail, we were kept in a courtroom. My parents came to pick us up. The City of Charleston acted in a very civil manner. We were charged and our case ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court which was thrown out. This was a couple years later, I was on my way to Clemson.

LYNN HAESSLY:

Did it permanently change the segregation at the lunch counter?

HARVEY B. GANTT:

Oh, it started a change in the minds of the whole place. It ultimately ended up in a movement that spread throughout all of Charleston. That occurred two years later, three years later. The year I went to Clemson, one of the same people, the young minister that led a movement called the Charleston Movement, which was massive demonstrations a la the Birmingham type things that occurred for public accommodations, not just lunch counters, but the whole works. That ultimately culminated in a large number of people who wanted to march on Washington and the North. I think all across the South those changes occurred during that year and the following year. But the sit-ins were the first, the very first, time this had ever happened.