CHIEF JUSTICE
ERNEST A. FINNEY, JR.
Our name is graced by the life and work of Ernest A. Finney Jr., who began his career as a civil rights attorney in South Carolina in 1955 and ended his legal career as the first Black Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme court since Reconstruction.
Ernest A. Finney, Jr. was the grandson of Black Virginia farmers and the progeny of two historically Black South Carolina colleges, Claflin University and South Carolina State University. A tireless advocate for justice and equality in South Carolina during the middle and late 20th century, Finney began his career as a civil rights attorney in 1955 and ended his legal career in 2000 as the first Black Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court since Reconstruction. Throughout his life he was also, quietly, an avid jazz listener and a passionate believer in the indelible and often untapped power of the Black community. Finney is remembered as “The Black Fox” for his uncanny ability to get people from all walks of life to sit at the table together, look each other in the eye, and grapple with the uncomfortable but necessary creation of a more justly aligned world.
Chief Justice Finney knew that art and culture powerfully shape and reshape a community, and that African American culture has contributed significantly to South Carolina’s, our country’s, and the world’s global store of truth, beauty, and activism. One of Ernest Finney’s private loves was Black music, especially Jazz. It
steadied him after a long day in court battling inequality and racism. He knew that the right music has the power keep the human heart believing and that it can indeed move mountains.
By Sam Roberts
Dec. 7, 2017
On Jan. 31, 1961, 10 black college students in Rock Hill, S.C., rejecting the warning of the state’s chief law enforcement officer, seated themselves at a whites-only lunch counter at the local McCrory’s five-and-dime store and asked to be served.
Dragged by police from their stools, the protesters, most of them from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, were charged with breach of the peace and trespassing. They were then hauled before Judge Billy D. Hays, who gave them a choice: Either pay a $100 fine or spend 30 days shoveling sand on a York County chain gang.
For nine out of the 10 protesters, the choice was clear. They had no intention of paying fines and thus help subsidize a segregationist local government. They took the jail time (knowing it would cost the county money for room and board), and in so doing helped galvanize the fledgling civil rights movement.
By then, sit-ins at lunch counters and elsewhere had begun to spread. But the Friendship Nine, as the Rock Hill protesters came to be called, were among the first defendants to embrace an emerging strategy of resistance to legal segregation: jail, not bail.
Their strategy of embarrassing segregated Southern communities by compounding their arrest with the spectacle of being imprisoned merely for ordering lunch or sitting in the wrong section of a bus or a theater, or worshiping at an all-white church, would be validated as the movement matured.
And their lawyer, Ernest A. Finney Jr., who had begun practicing full time only in 1960 after doubling as a teacher and working part time in a restaurant to make ends meet, would eventually be vindicated, too.
As a newly minted lawyer in the mid-1950s, Mr. Finney had not been invited to the state bar association convention because he was black. He managed to eavesdrop on the proceedings all the same — but only because he was working as a waiter at the time for the Ocean Forest Hotel in Myrtle Beach, where the convention was being held.
