
South Carolina’s governor warned Black students not to mix up with the “hot-headed agitators” and “confused lawyers” encouraging the fight against anti-Blackness and segregation. Benedict College student Simon Bouie promised his mother and grandmother he’d stay out of trouble. But when he walked into Eckerd Drug Store in 1960, prepared to sit at a whites-only lunch counter, Bouie knew that promise wasn’t his to keep.
Bouie wasn’t arrested alone. Six others risked being crammed into an overcrowded jail cell or locked into a chain gang. David Carter. Johnny Clark. Richard Counts. Milton Greene. Talmadge Neal. And Charles Barr – the only other one still alive – stood beside him the day all their arrest records were cleared.
It’s easy to see them now as heroes arrested for making “good trouble.” By identifying an anti-Black legal system as illegitimate, they were modeling the Black Radical Tradition. Breaking the law wasn’t just legitimate but inevitable.
Today, mainstream news tries to silo our protest as “peaceful” or “violent.” Supposedly, good or bad. When resistance movements, like Stop Cop City, threaten the status quo too much, community leaders are “terrorists” or “outside agitators.”
But our resistance isn’t just righteous and celebratory when it’s in a history book. A legal system that justifies our exploitation, subjugation, and murder is not worthy of our allegiance and respect. Our ancestors and elders laid that groundwork.