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GUIDE TO YELLOW SPR INGS | 2021– 2022 47 number of picketers was over 100, many of them with signs. The picketers were orderly, but their sheer numbers bothered some shoppers. Some merchants, their sales totals slumping, joined with the barber in asking that the Common Pleas Court limit the picketing. Judge Herman Weber limited it; he cut the number of pickets from 100 to 3, and then forbade all assembly of persons within 500 feet of Xenia Avenue. He assigned Greene County Sheriff Russell Bradley to enforce his decree. By a turn of fate, a group of Freedom Riders came to town on Friday, March 13, 1964, to tell students at Antioch, Cen - tral State University and Wil- berforce University about their civil rights work in the south. Many of the students had been on the barber shop picket line, and told the Freedom Riders about their dilemma. The Freedom Riders chal- lenged them: “Are you going to let a judge tell you what you can and cannot do?” It was agreed that picketers would meet at Kelly Hall on the Antioch campus at 11 a.m. the next day, before going to picket lines downtown. Local supporters of the anti-discrimination Village ordinance and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, who were working for a ruling on the case by the Ohio Supreme Court, appeared before the students and urged them to obey Judge Weber’s injunc- tion, so as not to jeopardize the Supreme Court case. The picketers promised no violence, but between 75 and 100 of them attempted to set up a picket line in front of the barber shop. When sheriff’s deputies attempted to arrest them, the picketers sat down on the sidewalk and locked arms. They did not fight the deputies, but went limp and made the deputies carry them to a bus that was waiting to transport them to jail in Xenia. What violence there was came from the law enforce- ment officers, when they tore picketers from the grasps of their fellow picketers and dragged them along the pave- ment to the bus. Bystanders reacted to the violence of this procedure by taking the places of displaced picketers. For a while the law enforce- ment officers’ task was made harder when a prominent local citizen held the back door of the bus open and those arrested, having entered the jail-bound bus by the front door, passed quickly through it and out the back door, to temporary freedom. The violence escalated. A Springfield policeman threw the first of several tear gas bombs. The local fire department, ordered by the judge or sheriff to bring out a pumper, poured a high-pressure stream of water on the defenseless picketers. A helmeted Montgomery County riot squad marched eight abreast down Xenia Avenue, their riot sticks held in readiness across their chests. Among those swept backward by the squad’s march were Horace and Beulah Champney. After two or three hours, Horace Champney told the remaining picketers they had successfully made their case for civil rights, and advised them to go home. They did. Later, the sheriff thanked Champney for bringing the day’s explosive events to an end. The 107 persons that were arrested that day crowded the Greene County and Xenia jails, and there was much activity by persons sympathetic to their cause to arrange for all of them to be released from jail during the next several days. The whole affair, though, was just one of the many activities in Yellow Springs which have been necessary to achieve the equality for its citizens promised them by the constitution of the United States. ♦