High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Friendship Nine was a group of African American men who went to jail after staging a sit-in at a segregated McCrory`s lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1961. The group gained nationwide attention because they followed an untried strategy called "Jail, No Bail", which lessened the huge financial burden civil rights groups were facing as the sit-in movement spread across the South. They became known as the Friendship Nine because eight of the nine men were students at Rock Hill`s Friendship Junior College. They are sometimes referred to as the Rock Hill Nine.