As the police were beating him, Charles "Chuck" McDew, a black man, wondered why his friends didn't intervene. What McDew did not understand was that he was in the South in 1959 and that it was dangerous for a black person to fight back when a police officer assaulted him.
"I didn't understand that it was worth their lives to hit a cop in 1960s South Carolina," said McDew, whose scuffles with Jim Crow laws led him to become a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
McDew related this experience and others of the Civil Rights Movement to students at James Madison High School last Friday, Jan. 16, during an assembly sponsored by the school's Combating Intolerance class. McDew urged students to better society and their communities, despite their youth.
"To be a student also has responsibility," said McDew, who had been only 16 when he and his fellow college students campaigned against segregation. "I think you all have to start reaching out and talking about what you need to do here in Fairfax, in Madison High School."
The students, in turn, were moved by the defiance McDew and others had exhibited against the corrupt culture.
"They were so young, but they took the challenge to make a difference," said Joanna Torrez, a junior.
McDew started out as a reluctant leader of the Civil Rights Movement as a defiant, yet self-absorbed freshman from Ohio. His parents had felt that their children should have the experience of going to a historically black college for at least one year, so McDew attended South Carolina State College, a black institution.
During Thanksgiving break, he and several friends were returning from a party. One of them had been drinking, and as they were driving, they were stopped by a police officer. As McDew was talking with the officer, the officer became upset because McDew was unfamiliar with the Southern custom of saying "yes sir, no sir."
Thinking McDew uppity, the officer hit him. Unexpectedly for the officer, McDew hit him back. The officer called for a reinforcement, and the two officers beat McDew, giving him a broken jaw. They also arrested him for disrespecting an officer and inciting a riot.
A few weeks later, as McDew was catching a train, the conductor told him to ride in the baggage car, which was the customary procedure for black passengers if the black car was already full.
But McDew refused to sit with the luggage and remained in his seat in the whites-only car. As a result, police arrested him a second time, for violating the segregation law.
By the time he returned to Ohio for Christmas, the freshman had been arrested six times.
"I came to understand a very simple lesson after a while — if something said ‘open to the public,’ it meant closed to black people," McDew said.
WORRIED ABOUT THEIR SON, McDew's parents told him that he could finish college in the North. McDew decided to finish the semester, which ended in February.
But something happened that prevented McDew from leaving. On Feb. 1, 1960, three students from Antioch College in North Carolina were arrested for refusing to leave the food counter at a five-and-dime store. Inspired by what had transpired in North Carolina, students at South Carolina State approached McDew to be the spokesperson for a college student sit-in group. McDew said no, explaining that it wasn't his problem.
Yet later that night, as he was reading the Talmud, a Jewish text, he read a passage convincing him to take action. As he read, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If not now, when," he decided that he must be a part of the movement against segregation. The next day, he apologized and agreed to help out
"The idea of, if not now, when, was very prominent in our lives," McDew said.
The student movement, which became the SNCC, set out to violate Jim Crow laws. They conducted sit-ins in whites-only establishments, demanding to be served. They organized freedom rides and had voting drives encouraging blacks to vote. If blacks voted, the SNCC reasoned, it would gradually displace the segregationists in federal and state office.
They declined joining Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement on nonviolence, which emphasized a nonviolent way of life in addition to being nonviolent. Even though their acts of civil disobedience were nonviolent, the SNCC members believed they couldn't make a moral appeal for understanding and acceptance in the midst of an amoral society.
Yet they made sure the student movement was integrated, because integration of society was the movement's goal.
"All of us were very, very young," McDew said. "We had the belief that we could change this country."
AFTER THE SNCC, McDew worked as a teacher and labor organizer and managed anti-poverty programs in Washington, D.C. He became a faculty member at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minn., where he still teaches.
When McDew relates his experiences to students, he urges them to be involved in the political process. At Madison, McDew illustrated his point by explaining that when the SNCC started, only two black elected officials existed in the entire country. Today, more than 7,500 blacks hold office across the country and at all levels.
Voting is "the most important right we have, to choose who our leaders are going to be," McDew said.
Several students afterward said they wanted to know how to fulfill McDew's charge.
"We still need to be activists, because nowadays the attitude seems to be, go with the flow," said Keir Daniels, a senior. "There's a lot more that needs to be done. My only question is, what sort of things can we start to change? Where can we start new movements?"