I WRITE this from small-town America, specifically a place called Rock Hill, in South Carolina, the home town of the artist who is illustrating my Arthurian poems. After spending some time in his studio, we wandered downtown together, and I was interested to note how often he greeted and recognised people as we walked. He had a greeting for each and, often, a story about them to tell me. It was a happy contrast to the cold anonymity of so many other places I’d seen in the States, places where there was no possibility of walking anywhere.

As we walked towards a diner on Main Street, he had another story to tell me. It was about “The Friendship Nine”: a group of nine African-American men who had been arrested in McCrories, the diner to which we were heading, in January 1961; arrested as “colored” men who had dared to take a seat at a lunch counter reserved for whites.

These young men had walked from Friendship College, a segregated college in which they were enrolled, as part of an early demonstration of what would become more widely known as the civil-rights movement. Their friends accompanied them holding simple handwritten placards that said “Segregation is morally wrong.” Members of the press were there, and the police were waiting, and arrested them for “trespass” as soon as they had taken their seats.

What made this protest, this courageous act of civil disobedience, so distinctive and influential was that these young men were prepared to refuse bail and go to jail. By doing so, they would not only break the cycle of continually paying money into an unfair legal system, but they would also bring greater attention to the segregated nature of lunch counters and other public places in Rock Hill and elsewhere. Indeed, their slogan, “Jail, no bail”, was taken up and used widely across the South in other protests that followed the model of this one.

It was a courageous and sacrificial step; for “jail” meant 30 days of hard labour in a racist prison that was designed to break their spirit. They all withstood the ordeal, and, remarkably, the friend and mentor who had supported them and steeled them to it was another resident of Rock Hill: David Boone, an advocate for equal rights, who had the distinction of being known for years among his fellow whites as “the most hated white person in South Carolina”. But, to his African-American friends, he was Brother David, a Roman Catholic Oratorian, and, under his guidance, the Oratory’s parochial school had, as early as 1954, become South Carolina’s first integrated school.

This was more than some local history from another era, something that had happened more than 60 years ago: it was a matter of living memory. As we walked towards the diner, Stephen, my illustrator, told me that he had witnessed personally a reunion of these heroes, in which the surviving members of the Friendship Nine met up again with the even older Brother David, embraced him, and greeted him joyfully as “Pops”.

When we arrived to take our seats at that same counter, there were already a number of hungry Rock Hill residents at the counter, too, eager for their lunch. Happily and unremarkably, white and African-American were seated side by side. Far from calling the police, the diner now hosts an exhibition in a side aisle honouring the Friendship Nine, with photographs of them all then and now, and, on a continuing loop, astonishing contemporary newsreel footage of the event itself.

When so much bad news is coming out of the US at a national and global level, I was heartened by this local witness to the immense good that could be done by a few dogged Christians in their own home place, witnessing among their neighbours to God’s indiscriminate love and the values of his Kingdom.