The local news no longer covered them. Then, in 1961, a 22-year-old organizer, Thomas Gaither, introduced a new tactic. In the next sit-in, at the lunch counter of a McCrory’s dime store in Rock ...

Thomas Gaither, one of the Black young men in the “Friendship Nine” who went to jail in Rock Hill in 1961 in protest of racial segregation, died Monday in Pennsylvania, his son Kenn Gaither said.