Chip Taylor

Jesse Jackson

He got his start as a political activist by protesting a genuine injustice.

Forty-five years ago to the day, there were only eight - Downs, Wright, Means and Jackson among them - each with a separate and deeply personal reason for walking into the whites-only library, picking up a book or a magazine and sitting wordless at a small wooden desk until police took them away in handcuffs.

It's almost unfathomable today.

"I can't imagine not being able to come to the library," said Tarita Dunbar, who brought her 13-year-old son, Will, to the Hughes Library Branch Saturday afternoon. Will says the public library has a much better selection than his middle school.

His choice to go there comes as a result of the actions of the Greenville Eight, Benjamin Downs among them. Now 62 and retired, Downs said he got a glimpse of just how much better white students had it when he went to take a college entrance examination at the all-white high school.

"I thought, this was better than the doggone public library that we (blacks) had on McBee Avenue. They even have more books," Downs recalled earlier Saturday from a wing of the Hughes Branch library. A self-described "nerd" in high school, Downs said he spent most of his recesses inside the library, reading.

"If there were better facilities, I just could not see why weren't they available to us," he said. "It never dawned on me that this would part of any type history or anything like that. It was just the fact that hey, the places here are publicly funded, so why not use them?"

So the eight students - three men and five women - walked through the library doors in an act of civil disobedience, speaking less than 10 words the entire time they were there, Downs recalled. Fifteen minutes later, a city police officer led them away.

We've come a long way since then. But we had a long way to come.

Another article about some of the protesters.