By May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public education unconstitutional, most Southern states had already desegregated their state universities, some voluntarily and some under a prophetic series of Supreme Court rulings on the practical inequality of “separate but equal” education. After the 1954 decision, some of the states had to pretend that the Negroes attending their universities with whites did not exist; otherwise, a good deal of the oratory of the late fifties would have been impossible. In 1957, for instance, when Governor Orval Faubus, of Arkansas, decided that the enrollment of a dozen Negro students in Central High School in Little Rock would result, as surely as election follows the Democratic nomination, in a breakdown of public order, the University of Arkansas had been integrated for nine years. Jimmie Davis promised the voters of Louisiana in 1959 that he would go to jail before allowing a Negro to attend classes with whites, and was elected governor on that platform, in a state whose university had been integrated for eight years. And a year later, when the Louisiana legislature passed a whole string of bizarre bills designed to prevent even the token integration of the New Orleans public schools, four hundred and twenty-five Negroes were attending the New Orleans branch of Louisiana State University.
In the states of the Deep South where no Negroes attended white universities before 1954, the first assault on segregation came in higher education, and came after the battle lines were drawn, with the result that it was considered as much of a threat to the system as if it had come in the grade schools or the high schools. The Negro students involved had none of the anonymity of those who had integrated the universities of Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, nor were they blurred by inclusion in a group, like the teen-agers in Little Rock or the four first-graders in New Orleans. One after another, they became famous, but only for two or three weeks, their names, in some cases, fading so quickly from the news that many people now find it hard to keep them straight: Autherine Lucy, at the University of Alabama; Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, at the University of Georgia; James H. Meredith, at the University of Mississippi; Harvey Gantt, at Clemson College, in South Carolina. Student Heroes of a strange new kind, they were famed for no achievements in athletics or scholarship but merely for showing up to attend classes. Their presence was the test of the desegregation order, whether the test resulted in successful defiance, as in Alabama, where Autherine Lucy was expelled after three days for accusing the university administration of complicity in the riots that accompanied her arrival, or in peaceful compliance, as in South Carolina, where the state authorities decided in advance that upon Harvey Gantt’s admission to Clemson order would be self-consciously maintained. Nowhere was the test more decisive than in Georgia, where Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, two Negroes from Atlanta, entered the state university, in Athens, in January of 1961. During their first week at the university—which began in relative calm, was climaxed by their both being suspended “for their own safety” after a riot, and ended with their both returning to the campus, under a new court order—Georgia abandoned its policy of all-out resistance and accepted desegregated education.
According to the lawyer for the plaintiffs, an Atlanta Negro named Donald Hollowell, the University of Georgia case was “the case that turned the state around and allowed them to start, or at least to see, what was in the other direction.” Few would disagree with his belief that the enrollment of Charlayne and Hamilton in the university was the turning point for Georgia, being accomplished in a way and at a time that made it inevitable (a word formerly scorned and now almost popular in Georgia) that the state would move forward rather than backward. The walk out of the Deep South mentality has been accelerated a good deal since then by a federal-court ruling against the County Unit System, which formerly made Georgia the only State to elect not only its legislature but its governors, senators, and congressmen by a voting system designed to favor the rural voter, and the atmosphere in Georgia now is far different from what it was when Charlayne and Hamilton showed up in Athens on a cold Monday morning two and a half years ago. Among the Student Heroes, Charlayne and Hamilton have another distinction, too. They are the first to have completed their education, or at least their undergraduate education. Since both entered the University of Georgia after completing the first half of their sophomore year elsewhere—Hamilton had gone to Morehouse, a private Negro men’s college in Atlanta, and Charlayne to Wayne University, in Detroit, during the year and a half it took them to get into Georgia after first applying for admission—they graduated this June, both in good standing and Hamilton as a Phi Beta Kappa. As a reporter then based in Atlanta, I had covered both the week-long trial that resulted in their admission and the events that followed their arrival on campus in 1961, and this spring, ten weeks before Charlayne and Hamilton graduated, I returned to Georgia from New York, where I had been living, to see how integration had worked out at the University of Georgia—whether or not the Student Heroes had ever become simply students. And because this question involved not only the university’s attitude toward them but their attitude toward the university, I began by trying to find out how these two young people had happened to become Student Heroes in the first place. Both had always been considered perfectly cast for the role. Good-looking and well dressed, they seemed to be light-complexioned Negro versions of ideal college students—models for an autumn Coca-Cola ad in a Negro magazine. Both had attended Turner High School in Atlanta, and Charlayne, a slim, attractive girl with striking hazel eyes, had edited the school paper, had been crowned Miss Turner, and had finished third in her graduating class. The valedictorian that year was Hamilton, who had been president of the senior class and, as a promisingly shifty halfback, co-captain of the football team. Since Charlayne and Hamilton had been such unlikely targets for abuse from the start, and had eventually been joined at the university by several other Negro undergraduates, the situation, looked at from a distance, seemed rather heartening. None of the stories from Georgia about school integration had mentioned any violence done to the pioneers. They had dealt instead with the peaceful integration of public schools in Atlanta and the admission of Negroes to Georgia Tech in September of 1961 without even the pressure of a court case. The atmosphere was such that Emory University, a private school in Atlanta, had been able to desegregate its nursing school voluntarily and was planning the integration of its medical school, having already chosen Hamilton Holmes as its first Negro medical student. But I knew from occasional communications I had had from Charlayne and Hamilton since they entered the university that the general progress of the State of Georgia often did not seem closely related to the day-to-day problems facing the first Negroes at the University of Georgia. I was reminded of this again by Charlayne’s reply to a letter I wrote her announcing my plans to revisit the campus. “Well, this is Brotherhood Week in Athens,” she concluded, with characteristic irony, “and I’m going out to stand on the street corner and wait for an invitation to lunch.”
Atlanta, called the Dogwood City on the city-limits signs, claims to have the most beautiful spring in America, and on my first day there the claim seemed justified. It was a warm March day, and in the heavily wooded residential sections the white dogwood blossoms were already coming out. Downtown, I saw another rite of spring. Some Negro students—like all students, Negro students are always more likely to protest in the spring—were picketing the Henry Grady Hotel, on Peachtree Street. The pickets, who also included two or three white students, were protesting the white-only policy maintained by the Henry Grady and most other Atlanta hotels. One sign read, “No Room at This Inn.” Another, more to the point in a city that prides itself on being concerned chiefly with commercial competition, read, “Dallas, Houston, and Miami—Why Not Atlanta?” To anyone who had lived in Atlanta in recent years, it was a familiar sight. The students, solemn and neatly dressed, were walking slowly up and down Peachtree, careful to stay the correct distance apart. Two or three Atlanta policemen, who had been assigned to make certain that the incident could be reported as having resulted in “no incidents,” stood in the shade of the hotel, but few of the passing shoppers gave the pickets a glance. I had watched the students picket department stores and movie theatres in Atlanta two years before, and it occurred to me that they would have little left to picket after the restaurants and hotels were desegregated—a move that seemed inevitable. (The word had always had some currency in Atlanta, even when it was not used in the rest of the state.) The hotelkeepers were already under pressure from businessmen, the editors of the newspapers, and members of the city administration, all of whom kept pointing out that hotel segregation might be costing Atlanta millions every year in convention business, plus a possible World’s Fair. The progressive Atlanta Constitution, which had only urged reasonable negotiations during previous demonstrations, had just come out flatly for desegregation of the hotels. Race relations in Atlanta, it seemed to me during my stay there, had taken on a faintly Northern flavor, with a lot of talk about brotherhood and the fine relations between the races, and great satisfaction at having schools that were technically integrated but did not actually have many Negroes in classes with whites The last race story I had read about Atlanta was on an essentially Northern topic—housing. The story, which concerned the erection of wooden barricades by the city across two streets between a Negro neighborhood and a white neighborhood that felt itself threatened by infiltration, even had a Northern ending. A judge of the state superior court—not a federal judge—ruled that the roadblocks were obviously racial barriers and were therefore unconstitutional, and he ordered the blemishes on Atlanta’s image removed, whereupon the white homeowners, announcing that they had nothing against Negroes, decided to move out of the neighborhood as a group.
The Atlanta Negro community has traditionally been led by the wealthy businessmen who run the insurance companies, banks, and real-estate offices on Auburn Avenue, and by the presidents of the six private Negro colleges that make up Atlanta University Center, and it has long had a considerable middle class, whose level of prosperity and education is the highest in the Negro South. Negroes have registered freely since 1944, when the white primary was declared unconstitutional, and in the last two mayoral elections in Atlanta the candidate who was elected did not have a white majority. But even though Atlanta was a relatively enlightened city—“too busy to hate” a former mayor used to say—it had achieved little integration by the late fifties. The traditional leaders of the Negro community, usually called the Old Leadership, seemed to have settled in to the belief that the white businessmen, always called the Power Structure, would take care of everything in time if the boat remained unrocked and the voting coalition remained unbroken. “Atlanta was comparing itself to Mississippi and saying how enlightened it was,” says Whitney Young, Jr., the executive director of the National Urban League and a former dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work. “Nothing was really integrated, not even the library or the buses, but the people were beginning to believe their own press clippings—even the Negroes.” Early in 1958, to make a study of just what had been done in Atlanta toward equality for the one out of every three citizens who was a Negro, Young and several other Negroes, most of whom were in their forties and most of whom had their headquarters on Hunter Street, in the newer Negro district, rather than on Auburn Avenue, started an informal group called the Atlanta Committee for Coöperative Action, or A.C.C.A. The editor of the study, which was published eight months later under the title “A Second Look,” was Carl Holman, who was then an English professor at Atlanta University Center’s Clark College, and is now the public-information officer for the Civil Rights Commission in Washington. From 1960 to 1962, Holman was also editor of the Atlanta Inquirer, a lively weekly founded during the Atlanta sit-ins by him and some other Negroes who were fed up with the cautious policies of Atlanta’s Negro daily newspaper. By the time “A Second Look” was published, it had the backing and financial assistance of the Old Leadership, and it immediately became a guide to the action that was needed. The younger men, working through existing organizations whenever that was possible and forming new ones when it wasn’t, initiated the action, pulling the Old Leadership behind them—the pattern that integration activities in Atlanta have followed ever since. The man from the A.C.C.A. group who was most concerned with school integration was Jesse Hill, Jr., the energetic young chief actuary of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, which is the second-largest life-insurance company in Georgia and one of Auburn Avenue’s most solid institutions. In 1957, Hill, who was a member of the education committee of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had enlisted the help of two or three other Negro leaders in an attempt to desegregate the Georgia State College of Business Administration, in Atlanta. Georgia State had the advantages of being a city college with no dormitories, which obviated travel and rooming problems, and of having night sessions. “In those days,” Hill told me when I visited him in Atlanta, “people hesitated to send a seventeen-year-old kid into that hostility, and we were working mainly to get older people to try for the night school. Frankly, we did some real campaigning. We tried to enlist some of the people in our own office, for instance. We got three girls to apply, and we won our court case, although the judge didn’t order the plaintiffs admitted. By that time, the state had investigated the girls who were applying and found some illegitimate births and that kind of thing with two, and so they could have been turned down on so-called moral grounds. Also, the state passed a law that said nobody over twenty-one could start as an undergraduate in a Georgia college, which eliminated the third girl and, of course, ended any chance of having older people apply for Georgia State.”
In 1958, working quietly (in anti-integration laws passed after the 1954 decision, Georgia strengthened its laws against barratry, or incitement of litigation), Hill and some of the other younger men compiled a list of outstanding seniors in the city’s Negro high schools and began to approach those whose academic records were so good that a college would have to find other reasons for rejecting them. Hill talked to about a dozen students, some of whom agreed to consider Georgia State and some of whom were more interested in the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech or the state medical college at Augusta. Ultimately, either because something in their backgrounds made them vulnerable to one kind of attack or another, or because of a final unwillingness to go through with it, none of these actually applied. Then, in June of 1959, Hill found Charlayne and Hamilton.
“Ordinarily, this is a selling job,” Hill told me. “You have to go seek out and work with these people and do quite a bit of selling. That’s how it’s been with the other kids at Georgia and those at Tech and all. But not Hamilton and Charlayne. They had an almost normal desire to go to the University of Georgia—as normal as you could expect from a Negro in a segregated community. They both knew something about the school; Hamilton had followed the football team, and Charlayne knew all about the journalism school. They were almost like two kids from Northside.” Northside is a formerly all-white high school in Atlanta’s best residential district, and it may be a sign of progress that one of the Negro freshmen at Georgia Tech last year actually was from Northside, having entered it as one of the nine Negro seniors who integrated Atlanta high schools in 1961. “Hamilton Holmes was on the list,” Hill went on. “But I really didn’t have to recruit those kids; they almost recruited me. They knew just what they wanted. I took them over to Georgia State. We were after a breakthrough, and we had a good chance there. The judge had retained jurisdiction in the case, and Georgia State had plenty of vacancies, because of this age law. The Atlanta Journal had run pictures of almost empty classrooms. That was important; after all, the University of Georgia kept Charlayne and Hamilton out for a year just by saying they were overcrowded, and it sounded pretty legitimate, on the face of it. Anyway, Charlayne and Hamilton wouldn’t hear of going to Georgia State. Both of them wanted to go to Georgia. Why they wanted to go I’ll never know, but it happened that that was the right thing. It got straight to the heart of the matter. I think the Governor might have closed Georgia State or the Atlanta high schools if they had come first, but Georgia, with all those legislators’ sons over there, and the way everybody in the state feels about it, was different. He wouldn’t dare close it.”
Once Charlayne and Hamilton had decided to go to Georgia, Hill set out to do battle again with the system that had defeated him in the Georgia State case. He fired the first volley of letters and phone calls through the facilities of Atlanta Life, and then got the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter to put up the money for the legal expenses that were necessarily incurred before the litigation got far enough along to be eligible for aid from the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (a separate corporation from the N.A.A.C.P. itself, and usually called the Inc. Fund, or the Ink Fund). Hill had to make a lot of long-distance calls to find the Turner High School principal, whose signature was required on the application forms and who had left for the summer. Hill went to the Fulton County Courthouse with Charlayne and Hamilton, towing their pastors along as references, and was passed from judge to judge until the clerk of the Fulton County Superior Court finally agreed to certify that both of the young people were residents of the State of Georgia—documentation that the federal court ruled was adequate without the addition of alumni recommendations, which were formerly required and which, naturally, were not easy for Negro applicants to obtain. Hill, Holman, and Young met with Charlayne and Hamilton to warn them of what to expect from Georgia admissions officials and Georgia students. “I had sent for application blanks and a catalogue and hadn’t got them,” said Hill. “We wanted to make sure we had them in time. Like most places, the University of Georgia has Negroes to do the cleaning up, and one of the janitors got application blanks and catalogues for us. Every time we took a step, we double-checked. I must have written a hundred letters to the university; they wouldn’t tell you anything. Don Hollowell checked every letter. We had to certify it and send it registered mail, receipt requested. Anything that got lost, that was the end of that for another year. It was just like pulling teeth. Carl Holman checked and double-checked the applications. We didn’t leave anything to chance. And still, it took a year and a half.”
The energy was provided by the same men who had published “A Second Look.” In the first weeks after Charlayne and Hamilton applied, the A.C.C.A. group even maintained a nightly patrol of Charlayne’s house. (Atlanta has always had more bombings than Southern cities with otherwise less progressive race relations; there were a dozen in the twelve months prior to public-school integration.) Support from the rest of the Negro community varied greatly. Some members thought that Georgia Tech or the Atlanta public schools would be a better place to begin. Others believed that it was rather early to begin anywhere. “A lot of people were opposed to this,” Hill told me. “They said, ‘These people are going to take reprisals on us. There’ll be a loss of jobs, and all.’ During the Georgia State case, one leader of the Negro community said, ‘Why’d you take those unwed mothers over there?’ After Charlayne and Hamilton applied at Georgia, he said, ‘Why’d you take those two fine kids over there?’ All we ever got from the older leaders was ‘You’re going to mess up some kids.’ ”
Just why “two fine kids” like Hamilton and Charlayne should want to go to any Southern white college is a question that is often asked in the North, where many people take it for granted that a Negro student would go to jail for the right to eat a dime-store hamburger but must have an elaborate motive for going to a formerly all-white school. Most white Southerners have already settled the question to their own satisfaction. They believe that the students are chosen by the N.A.A.C.P.—hand-picked by one of the crafty operators from New York, where all evil finds its source, and probably paid handsomely for their services. The New York-based N.A.A.C.P. conspiracy remains a strong vision to most white Southerners, even though it should be apparent by now that if the N.A.A.C.P. had a tenth of the resources and efficiency they credit it with, segregation would have been eradicated years ago. As for Negroes in Atlanta, when they talk about why Hamilton went to the University of Georgia they usually begin by mentioning his family, and especially his grandfather, Dr. Hamilton Mayo Holmes, who is an Atlanta physician and the family patriarch. Hamilton is not only a third-generation college graduate; he is also a third-generation integrationist. His grandfather, his father, and one of his uncles filed suit to desegregate the Atlanta public golf courses in 1955, and, through a 1956 Supreme Court decision on their case, the courses became the first integrated public facility in Atlanta. I had spent some time with Hamilton’s father, Alfred Holmes, during the integration in Athens, and on one of my first days in Atlanta this spring I arranged to talk with him at his office about both his son and his father. Alfred Holmes, who is known in Atlanta as Tup, is a short, chunky man with a breezy manner and a cheerful, chipmunkish expression. He seems to know everybody on the street, whether it is Hunter Street or Auburn Avenue, in Atlanta, or Hancock Street, in Athens, where he worked for six or eight months as an embalmer early in his career. Almost everybody he sees gets a cheery “How you makin’ it?” or “You makin’ it O.K.?” Strictly Hunter Street in philosophy himself, Tup Holmes shares an office building there with the Atlanta Inquirer, the law offices of Donald Hollowell and his associates, the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P. (which disturbed some of the Old Leadership by moving there from Auburn Avenue not long ago), the Southeastern Regional Office of the N.A.A.C.P., and a school for beauticians. Holmes has been in several businesses, mostly selling one thing or another, and the office he ushered me into—a small one—was devoted to the sale of real estate and insurance. Having assured him that I was making it O.K., I asked him about Hamilton’s decision to go to the University of Georgia.
“The aggressiveness of the family might have influenced him, but Hamp’s a steady sort of boy,” Holmes said. “He’s always thought deeply and on his own. Jesse Hill asked if I would mention Georgia to Hamp, because he was just about perfect, with his grades and his personality. That’s all I had to do was mention it; before I could do anything else, he had already talked to Jesse. I went down to Athens once or twice, and I tell you he’s two different people when he’s there and when he’s in Atlanta. He lives for Friday afternoon, when he can come home. There’s really no one in that town for him to talk to, and he’s not the kind to do much visiting. He sticks to his lessons. He made up his mind he was going to make those crackers sit up and take notice. You know, I travel around the state quite a bit in my business, and sometimes I talk in the high schools or the churches. I didn’t realize for quite a while what a hero this boy is to those people in the backwoods. When I’m being introduced to a group of people, sooner or later the man introducing me gets around to saying, ‘This is the father of Hamilton Holmes.’ And they say, ‘You mean the Hamilton Holmes up at Georgia? Let me shake your hand.’ I think he means so much to those people because of his grades. The white man in the South has always accepted the Negro as his equal or superior physically, because he figures we’re not far removed from the jungle and we’ve had to do physical work for so long that our muscles have got hard. But the whites never have accepted us as their equal or superior mentally. They have always said that the Negro is only good for plowing. Well, Hamp is destroying all those myths. He’s made the Phi Kappa Phi honor society, you know, and we hope he’ll make Phi Beta Kappa. When those people in the backwoods see those A’s, they stand up. That’s why he means more to them than James Meredith, or even Charlayne.”
After we had talked a while longer, Holmes said, “Well, if you’re going to get in to see Daddy, we’d better get over there. If you come after eleven-thirty, there’s so many patients you can’t get near the place.” On the drive from Hunter Street to Auburn Avenue, where Dr. Holmes has his office, Tup Holmes told me about his father, whose prowess as a doctor, a golfer, and a speaker makes him almost as popular a subject for conversation in the Holmes family as Hamilton. “My daddy’s a real scrapper,” Tup Holmes said. “He ran away from home when he was twelve to go to school. He was from Louisiana. The backwoods. And I mean the real backwoods. He worked in the sugar mills in New Orleans and went to school at night in a small school that’s now part of Dillard. Then he worked his way through Shaw Medical School, in North Carolina, and came to Atlanta to practice—that was in 1910. He’s a real scrapper. Daddy was a pioneer on this golf-course thing. It required a lot of courage on his part, especially considering all the training and inhibitions of his generation. You have to remember that when he was coming up he would have to tip his hat and move to the side every time he saw a white lady on the street.”
When we arrived at Dr. Holmes’ office, on the fourth floor of an old building, it was half an hour before his office hours began, but six or eight patients were already sitting in the waiting room, watching television. They hardly looked up as Holmes and I walked into the Doctor’s office, where a nurse from the treatment room, adjoining, told us to make ourselves comfortable until the Doctor arrived. Dr. Holmes’ office was a small room, containing an old-fashioned desk, a refrigerator, a day bed, a floor safe with a filing cabinet on top of it, and two or three tables. Almost every flat surface was covered with golfing trophies, and the walls were covered with a staggering collection of plaques, pictures, and framed prayers. There were several religious pictures, some family pictures, and numerous plaques from golf Organizations and fraternities. In one frame were three glossy prints of Hamilton and Charlayne and a letter from the Half Century Alumni Club of Shaw University. The wall decorations also included a chart showing the postal zone of every street in Atlanta, a sports award from radio station WSB for a hole-in-one made on January 1, 1961, and a cardboard reprint of the Prayer for Physicians by Maimonides. Between a plaque signifying life membership In the United Golfers Association, which is the Negro equivalent of the U. S. Golfers Association, and a poem about medicine from the Fifty Year Club of American Medicine hung an eye chart.
After a few minutes, Dr. Holmes hustled in. A jolly man, shorter, chunkier, and darker than his progeny, he had a tiny gray mustache and a tiny gray goatee. Since he also had tufts of gray hair on the sides of his head and more tufts of gray hair for eyebrows, he looked like a tiny Uncle Remus. He wore a three-piece blue suit, a diamond stickpin, and a watch chain. When Dr. Holmes heard that I was there to ask about Hamilton, he could hardly wait to begin.
“I trained my children from infancy to fear nothing, and I told my grandson the same thing,” Dr. Holmes said. “I told him to be meek. Be meek, but don’t look too humble. Because if you look too humble they might think you’re afraid, and there’s nothing to be afraid about, because the Lord will send his angel to watch over you and you have nothing to fear. I’m glad Hamp has faith; you have to have faith. Science is not enough; you have to have more than science. You have to know the Lord is watching over you. Hamp is a religious boy and he’s a natural-born doctor. He’s wanted to be a doctor since infancy. I told his mother before he was born, I said, ‘You just think on medicine and if it’s a boy maybe the prenatal influence will make him a natural-born doctor.’ And she did think on it, and sure enough, that’s what he is, a natural-born doctor.”
Dr. Holmes talked a bit about his own practice. “I’ve been practicing medicine here for fifty-three years, and I’m busier now than I’ve ever been,” he said. “I come in at eleven-forty-five and I stay until four-thirty or five. I come back at seven and stay till ten-thirty or eleven. I don’t much like to work past eleven any more. I try to treat everybody as an individual. Once, a lady came in and said, ‘You sure took a long time with that last patient,’ and I said, ‘O.K., if you want, I’ll hurry on you.’ She said, ‘Don’t hurry on me. Oh, no!’ Well, I treat them all like individuals, but I still see fifty or sixty patients a day. I work every day but Wednesday and Sunday. I play golf on Wednesdays, and on Sundays I go to church. Then I play golf.”
I asked Dr. Holmes if his game was still as good as the trophies indicated.
“I beat nearly everybody I play with, young and old alike,” he admitted. “They say, ‘I’m waiting for you to get tired.’ I tell them they better beat me now, because I’m not going to get tired. I’ll be seventy-nine on the fourth of April, but not an ache, not a pain, not a stiffness in the joints. Not a corn, not a callus, not a bunion on my feet. And my memory is as good as it was fifty years ago.” And Dr. Holmes stretched his muscles and his joints to demonstrate their efficiency. I certainly had no reason to doubt it, or to doubt his memory. (“Hamp’s granddaddy is quite a character,” Charlayne told me a day or two later. “He called up once and said he’d decided Hamp and I should get married, and he’d give me any kind of convertible I wanted for a wedding present. He hadn’t consulted Hamp, of course. I explained to him that Hamp and I were more like brother and sister, and that Hamp had a girl. But he said we would just have to get married, because we’d have such smart children.”)
Charlayne, unlike Hamilton, is rarely explained as the logical result of a family tradition. In fact, even at the age of eighteen, when she entered the University of Georgia, she seemed remarkably independent. “She’s always wanted to be out front,” I was once told by her mother, a pretty, retiring woman who works as a secretary in a Negro real-estate company. “When she was a little girl, I never had to get after her to do her lessons, or anything. She’s just always been that way.” Charlayne’s poise during the first days of integration was occasionally attributed to her having spent her eighth-grade year as one of only a few Negroes in an integrated Army school in Alaska, where her father, Charles Hunter, a career Army chaplain, was stationed. Now retired, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was often the first Negro to hold whatever post he was assigned to, but the extent of his influence on Charlayne is not certain. He and Mrs. Hunter separated after the year in Alaska, and Charlayne, who had previously gone for long stretches without seeing her father while he was overseas, rarely saw him after that, for she returned to Atlanta to live with her mother, her two younger brothers, and her grandmother. Charlayne’s father is a Methodist minister and her mother is also a Methodist, but Charlayne became a Catholic when she was sixteen. At Georgia, Charlayne continued to look at things from a point of view of her own. In fact, because she was a journalism student, she had a kind of double vision for those two and a half years. During her first week or two at Georgia, she sometimes seemed to be watching the reporters watch her integrate the university, occasionally making notes on both phenomena for one of the articles on the integration she was later to write for the Atlanta Inquirer. According to Carl Holman, who, as editor of the Inquirer, had also found that covering the integration news often meant observing his own activities, “It gave her a detachment she might not have had otherwise. Hamilton has the views of the average citizen on the subject; that is, he regards reporters as just as dangerous as anyone else. But Charlayne was always studying them, and I think it made her feel better that they were around.”
One day last March, while Charlayne was at home for several days after her next-to-last round of final examinations at Georgia, she and I met for lunch at a restaurant on Hunter Street, and I found that she was still able to see her experience as a news story. Although she had always received more attention in the press than Hamilton, she assured me that Hamilton made a better study. “He’s consistent and I’m not,” she said. “He knows what he wants and where he’s going and how he’s going to get there. We’re a lot different. For instance, he can’t wait for Friday. He comes back to Atlanta every weekend. He has a girl here, and his family. I think my mother and brothers are great, but that’s the only reason I come home at all. I’d just as soon stay in Athens and sleep or read. Hamp’s very uncomfortable there. For one thing, he’s not crazy about white people. And he loves Atlanta. I guess I’m just as comfortable there as I am anyplace else. Hamp and I were sort of rivals at Turner, but we usually agreed on big things. I wanted to go to journalism school, and I had considered Georgia, but not really seriously. It seemed such a remote possibility. I had just about decided to go to Wayne, for no special reason except they had a journalism department and had answered my letters and I wanted to go to school away from home. When Hamp brought up Georgia—I think it was while we were posing together for a yearbook picture—I said sure, I’d like to go. It seemed like a good idea. I can’t stress enough that I didn’t ponder it. I guess it always was in my mind that I had the right, but Hamp and I never had any discussions about Unalienable, God-given Rights. We just didn’t speak in those terms. It sounded like an interesting thing to do, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking this would never really happen; it was just something we were doing. I guess at that stage of the game we thought that anything we wanted to do was possible. Each step got us more involved, but we didn’t think of it that way. We just went step by step, and it seemed kind of like a dream. When we got together with Jesse Hill and Hollowell and Carl and Whitney Young, they thought we ought to go to Georgia State. It also had journalism courses, and I really didn’t know the difference. Negro kids don’t know anything about white colleges. We figured if it was white it was good. We picked up applications at Georgia State, but neither one of us really liked the place; the catalogue showed they really didn’t offer much. We went out on the steps and stood around, and Hamp said, ‘I want to go to Athens. That’s the place to go.’ And he pointed right in the direction of Athens. I said, ‘I’m with you,’ and they said ‘O.K., you’ll go to Athens.’ I think a lot of it was Hamp’s having always taken an interest in the Georgia football team.”
One reason for the dreamlike quality of the eighteen months that followed was that, except for two or three hearings they had to attend, Charlayne and Hamilton were merely spectators of the complicated maneuvers that Jesse Hill and Donald Hollowell—eventually joined by Constance Baker Motley, associate counsel of the Inc. Fund—were carrying on with the state. Charlayne and Hamilton regularly submitted applications, which were regularly turned down, usually on the ground of a space shortage, and all they had to do to be rejected again was to submit their college transcripts each semester. They did have to appear in federal district court in Macon, in the summer between their freshman and sophomore years, but at that time Judge William Bootles refused to order them into the university through a temporary restraining order, ruling that they had not exhausted their administrative remedies. He did, however, schedule a December trial on a motion for a permanent injunction. Under Judge Bootles’ orders, Charlayne and Hamilton both went to Athens for admission interviews that November. At these, Charlayne was treated politely, and Hamilton, appearing before a three-man panel, was asked such questions as whether or not he had ever been to a house of prostitution or a “tea parlor” or “beatnik places”—questions that, BootIe later noted in a judicial understatement, “had probably never been asked of any applicant before.”
All-out stalling is not an ineffective strategy, as Southern white strategies against integration go. It worked well against the first Negro who tried to get into the University of Georgia—Horace Ward, who sued for admission to the law school in 1952. The stalling went on until 1957, by which time Ward had stayed out of school for a year or so, had then been drafted, had served in the Army, and had finally entered another law school, so that a federal Judge ruled the case moot. The possibilities of carefully managed stalling are demonstrated in a sentence from the decision that eventually ordered the university to admit Charlayne and Hamilton. “Plaintiffs have already prosecuted one appeal through administrative channels which required 122 days for final administrative action,” Judge Bootles wrote. “If plaintiffs were required to appeal from defendants’ failure to admit them each quarter for which they made application for admission, they would probably use up the normal four-year college attendance period before securing any final administrative action.” Some federal judges in the South, as a matter of fact, probably would never have ended the stalling, since the reasons given for rejecting Charlayne and Hamilton always sounded plausible enough. And such delaying tactics, even if it could be assumed that they would end sooner or later, forced applicants either to stay out of school, which Charlayne and Hamilton, ambitious and anxious to get started, would obviously not do, or to enter another college and complicate their problems by applying as transfer students. Indeed, Georgia admissions officials said they were very much concerned about the credits Charlayne and Hamilton might lose if they transferred in the middle of the year from colleges that divide the school year into two semesters to a college that, like the University of Georgia, divides it into three quarters. (The summer session constitutes the fourth quarter.) Shortly after Charlayne and Hamilton applied, Georgia began to accept transfer students only when they fell into certain categories, supposedly based on whether a transfer was necessary for the continuation of a student’s program, and Charlayne never seemed to be in the right category. Also, after a year and a half of college life among friends, both students found the idea of facing the hostility of the University of Georgia much less appealing than it had seemed following high-school graduation, when Georgia had sounded like a good idea and also like something a long way off. This was especially true of Hamilton, who went to Morehouse, the most highly regarded of the Atlanta University Center colleges. An alumnus of Morehouse—Charlayne’s father is one—is always called a “Morehouse man” by Atlanta Negroes, who are proud of A.U.’s School of Social Work, and of Spelman, its girls’ college, but especially of Morehouse. During a visit to see Hamilton’s mother in March, I asked his brother Herbert, who is a freshman at Morehouse, how he thought Hamilton compared Morehouse and Georgia, and I was assured that Hamilton preferred Morehouse in every respect but one: he thought Georgia’s science facilities were superior. Herbert seemed concerned lest I get the impression that anybody could be happier somewhere else than he could be at Morehouse. The mantelpiece of the Holmes house had almost as many trophies for Hamilton’s achievements as a regular student at Morehouse and Turner as for his being a Student Hero at Georgia. There were a trophy that he had received for being the outstanding freshman football player at Morehouse; a Turner High valedictorian trophy; the National Newspaper Publishers Association Russwurm Award for “making possible a richer conception of democratic principles [at Georgia];” a trophy from Turner for excellence in math; two trophies for his attendance at Georgia from Alpha Phi Alpha, the fraternity that Hamilton joined at Morehouse; and a plaque from the Turner High School P.-T.A., given to Mr. and Mrs. Holmes.
Hamilton’s mother, Isabella Holmes, turned out to be an articulate, attractive woman with a gentle voice, which added force to, rather than detracted from, what she said. She had grown up in Tuskegee, Alabama, where her father edited one of the trade magazines published by Tuskegee Institute, and where she had met her husband while both were students at the Institute. When Mrs. Holmes mentions integration, she is almost always talking about the integration of blind and partly sighted children into regular classrooms—a pioneer project in Atlanta that Mrs. Holmes, as a sixth-grade teacher, has been taking part in for several years. “Hamp was supposed to go to Morehouse through the early-admissions program the year before he got out of Turner,” Mrs. Holmes told me. “He had a four-year Merrill Scholarship that paid full tuition. But that summer he decided he didn’t want to give up his senior year at Turner, and later he decided on Georgia. Then, I remember the day the judge’s decision was handed down after Hamp had been at Morehouse a year and a half. I saw that the judge said they didn’t have to enter that quarter, or even spring quarter. And since I knew how much Morehouse meant to Hamp, the first thing I said was that he wouldn’t be letting anybody down if he waited until fall. He surprised me. He said, ‘No, I’ve got to go now.’ Hamp doesn’t do much talking, and sometimes you don’t know what he’s thinking. It’s lonely for him down in Athens. It’s particularly hard for a boy who’s from a large family. With four others, there’s no such thing as isolation in this house. You’d think some students there would make overtures to a boy in a situation like that. It’s hard for me to believe that nobody would bother, unless the boy was objectionable. I guess I’ll never understand. He got so low last spring, when he saw the other boys playing baseball on the lawn and all, that I wanted him to come home for a while. He wouldn’t hear of coming home. If Corky King, the Presbyterian minister there, hadn’t started having him over to dinner every week, I don’t know what would have become of him. I sometimes wish one of my other boys, Gary, the one who’s in college in Charlotte now, had gone instead of Hamp. They could have run him over with a truck and not bothered him. But Hamp is very sensitive in many ways.”
I knew that the family had been subject to harassment after Hamilton applied, and I asked Mrs. Holmes about this.
“We had quite a time here with the phone,” she said. “I think they had the phone tapped, because they cut in on conversations, and if you left it off the hook it would cut off and go dead, and you couldn’t call out. We complained to the phone company, and they gave us a private number, but before I even knew the number myself—they sent it by mail—the calls began coming in on that one. They would start about the time I got in from work and go through the night. Sometimes, when we left the phone off the hook, we’d have to cover it with something, because they would just keep talking. And I hated to be without the phone. And I was afraid about somebody passing by. I think I even imagined things when I got into the car and put my foot on the starter. I also wondered about jeopardizing other people if somebody passed by and threw something. I did wonder sometimes if it was worth it.”
Hamilton spent most of his final spring break this March filling speaking engagements—a function he had left pretty much to Charlayne during their first two years at Georgia. “I’m getting around a little more,” he said when I finally got him on the phone, late that same week. “But with me the studies still come first.” He went on to say that he was scheduled to speak at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Atlanta that Sunday, and I arranged to meet the Holmes family there.
Sunday was another beautiful spring day in Atlanta. It was, in fact, Safe Boating Sunday in WSB-land, the radio announcer said as I drove over to Emmanuel Baptist, a neat, new red brick church in the middle of a red brick Negro housing project in the southeastern section of the city. Hamilton’s father was chatting with friends in the vestibule when I arrived, and he led me down to the first row, where his wife and his father were already seated. Dr. Holmes looked as natty as he had in his office, wearing a blue suit with a light pin stripe, a blue tie, his diamond stickpin, and, hanging from his watch chain, a medallion, which, he told me a few minutes later, was one of Tup’s golf awards. “I have a lot of them of my own, but I like this one,” he explained. “It looks like a gold dollar. Tup got it in Chicago in 1940 or 1941.”
That was enough to turn the conversation to golf.
“About the only time I leave town is for golf tournaments,” said Dr. Holmes. “I used to go to a lot of medical meetings, but I’m getting tired of them. I play in three tournaments a year, usually—United Golfers Association tournaments, in the senior division. I usually shoot in the low eighties.”
“He kills those old men,” Tup Holmes said proudly. “He just kills them. But he hasn’t been able to shoot his age yet. It’s all mental. He gets a thirty-six or thirty-seven on the first nine and then he gets to thinking about it and he blows it on the back nine. He gets nervous.”
Dr. Holmes acknowledged that Tup was the best golfer in the family when he was in form—he won the national U.G.A. in 1947, in Philadelphia, and again in 1958, in Pittsburgh—but said he was able to beat him occasionally. “In the seniors, I win first place sometimes, second place sometimes, and sometimes third place, although not often,” he went on. “The seniors are for men over fifty, and you have to remember that I didn’t have a golf club in my hands until I was fifty. Some of those other fellows are experienced.”
I reminded Dr. Holmes that even though he had a late start, he’d had twenty-nine years of experience, and he just smiled and turned toward the pulpit, for the service was about to begin.
According to our programs, the church was holding its Annual Youth Day Observance, on the theme of “Christian Youth and Their Spiritual Challenge in an Emerging Age of World Freedom,” although the bulletin board on the lawn outside had said merely, “9:30—Sunday School. 10:45—Hamilton Holmes.” About half an hour after the service was scheduled to begin, Hamilton walked out on the platform with four girls. He looked about the same as when I had last seen him, almost two years before, except that some extra weight accented the start of the heaviness around the jaw that seems to be a Holmes characteristic. He was, as usual, well dressed, wearing an Ivy League-cut blue summer-weight suit, a rep tie, and a white button-down shirt, and he had a tiny Alpha Phi Alpha pin in his lapel. As Hamilton shifted in his seat through the first part of the service, his face had the serious look that most people at Georgia had interpreted as a scowl. The service, conducted by the four girls, proceeded through an opening hymn, a responsive reading, the morning hymn, a scripture lesson, the morning prayer, a selection by the youth choir, a statement of purpose, several selections by the Turner High School choral ensemble, the collection, and the doxology. Finally, one of the girls introduced Hamilton, calling him “a militant and pioneering young speaker who has symbolized and portrayed in his own actions and character the fight for human dignity and first-class citizenship.” There was one more hymn, and then Hamilton rose to speak.
Putting on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, he read from a prepared text entitled “Higher Education and the New Negro”—Hamilton’s favorite speech topic. He began by outlining advances in science, in industry, and even in housework—advances that had eliminated many traditional Negro jobs. There was, he went on, an increasing need for highly trained workers, and that need could be filled by the New Negro, “who realizes he is just as good as any other man . . . not the Negro sitting passively around waiting for his rights to be handed to him on a silver platter.” Hamilton said that movements like the sit-ins had opened doors but that the Negro must be prepared to go through them, and that his greatest drawback was his lack of education. “Ours is a competitive society,” he continued. “This is true even more so for the Negro. He must compete not only with other Negroes but with the white man. In most instances, in competition for jobs and status with whites, the Negro must have more training and be more qualified than his white counterpart if he is to beat him out of a job. If the training and qualifications are equal, nine times out of ten the job will go to the white man. This is a challenge to us as a race. We must not be content to be equal, education- and training-wise, but we must strive to be superior in order to be given an equal chance. This is something that I have experienced in my short tenure at the University of Georgia. I cannot feel satisfied with just equalling the average grades there. I am striving to be superior. I have found that I must be superior in order to be accepted as an equal. If the average is B, then I want an A. The importance of superior training cannot be overemphasized. This is a peculiar situation, I know, but it is reality, and reality is something that we Negroes must learn to live with.”
That was, I thought, a pretty good summary of Hamilton’s philosophy at Georgia—what his father would call “making those crackers sit up and take notice.” As Hamilton sat down, a man in the congregation said, in a sonorous voice, “Richly spoken, richly spoken.” He turned out to be the minister of Emmanuel Baptist, Benjamin Weldon Bickers, and he came forward at that point to take over from the girls and introduce some guests, including three students from integrated Atlanta high schools. He also introduced Mr. and Mrs. Holmes, and Hamilton’s sister, Emma, who had joined the family after singing in the Turner chorus, and two or three more Holmeses, and then somebody reminded him that he had neglected Dr. Holmes. Bickers not only introduced the Doctor but asked him to say a few words.
Dr. Holmes, still beaming over Hamilton’s speech, popped right up and turned around to face the congregation. “Brothers and sisters,” he began, “I assure you that it is a pleasure to be here. I always hoped I would be able to live long enough to see this young man stand as he stands in the community and in his daily deportment. It gives me a thrill, and I thank the Lord I lived long enough to see it. And to have such a fine boy! He does not smoke or chew; he does not drink beer, wine, or liquor. I told him when he was a little boy, ‘Never live long enough to smoke or drink.’ As a result, here he is. It did me good to hear him philosophize, to go step by step through what the New Negro needs. It did me good, and I thank the Lord I lived long enough to hear him.” The congregation was nodding in approval. Dr. Holmes digressed briefly to talk about another grandchild, a girl who had gone to Elmira College, in upstate New York, as an exchange student from Spelman and had immediately become the star of the choir. “I’m glad I took the Biblical advice not to let your riches pile up where thieves and robbers can get them but to deposit them in your children,” Dr. Holmes went on. “I’m proud of this boy. And we don’t want him to stop. We want him to get his M.D. or his Ph.D. or whatever D. he wants. He might be too smart to practice. He might have to teach. But we want him to have everything he wants. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
As Dr. Holmes turned and sat down, there was the shuffling and murmuring of a congregation that wanted to show approval but knew better than to clap in church. Just as I thought I might have witnessed my first Negro church meeting in the South that had only one collection, Mr. Bickers announced that he was going to collect Hamilton’s honorarium right there, and passed the plate again.
Although Hamilton’s family has long been active in community affairs, the only one of his relatives professionally involved in race relations is his uncle, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was destined by Dr. Holmes to be the family lawyer but ended up as a Congregationalist minister instead. A small, cheerful man, and the most direct heir to the patriarch’s jolly eloquence, Oliver Holmes is the associate director of the Georgia Council on Human Relations. In 1956, the Council grew out of the Georgia Interracial Committee, which was founded right after the First World War to start some communication between white and Negroes, meeting as equals. Among the early participants in the Georgia Interracial Committee was Oliver Holmes’ mother—Hamilton’s grandmother—who, as one of the first Negro registered nurses in the South, was, before her death, a prominent member of the Negro community. “Mama used to go have her tea and cookies once a month,” Oliver Holmes recalled when I visited him at the organization’s headquarters in Atlanta. “And we’d say, ‘Well, Mama, you’ve had your tea and cookies now, and next month you can go have your tea and cookies again.’ But I think it actually did do some good. It kept the lines of communication open, and they could have closed easily in those days.”
I had first met Oliver Holmes two years before in Savannah, where he had become pastor of the First Congregational Church in 1959, after several years of preaching in Talladega, Alabama. While he was in Talladega, he had organized the area’s first N.A.A.C.P. branch, but, he said, the most important case was a criminal one, rather than one involving civil rights. It came up when “a drunken Negro cabdriver, in a one-eyed car with no brakes, in the raIn, hit and killed two white policemen who were harassing a couple of college kids who were parked there by the side of the road doing a little light necking.” Holmes went to Birmingham and came back with a young Negro defense lawyer. “They said if a colored lawyer came there to defend that boy, he’d be lucky not to get the chair himself,” said Holmes. As the case turned out, the cabdriver got only five years for manslaughter, because the policemen had been on the wrong side of the road, and the accident was, despite his condition and the multiple handicaps of his car, not his fault. “Everybody in the town was just as happy as could be,” Holmes told me. “The Negroes said, ‘Our lawyer got that boy off with five years,’ and the whites said, ‘DespIte that little nigger, we put that boy away for five years.’ When it came time that he was eligible for parole, we went up to see him at the state prison farm and he said, ‘Don’t you bother me about any parole. I’m driving a tractor and I got more money in my pocket than I ever had and I don’t want to leave. When my time is up, I’m going to ask for an extension.’ Yes sir, everybody was happy about that case.”
While Holmes was in Talladega, he found time to make trips to Atlanta for golf, and he was in the foursome that tested the public golf course on the segregation issue in 1955. “When we first went out there to make the test, they were a little surprised,” he said. “I went up to the window and asked for four tickets, and the man said, ‘Tickets for what?’ I told him, ‘For whatever you’re selling them for.’ And he said he couldn’t sell us any tickets, because the course wasn’t open to Negroes. I told him that was what I thought—just testing. After the Supreme Court decision, we went out to play, and we figured somebody had better stay home, in case something happened. So we finally convinced Daddy that as long as he held the purse strings, maybe he’d better stay home. He didn’t want to. He sure is crazy about golf, and he was just as excited as he could be about this. My brother Tup was really up for this game, with the press out there and everything. I think he had been practicing for it; he shot a thirty-eight on the first nine. I had been stuck out in Talladega without much chance to play and my game was a little off, and maybe I was a little nervous.”
When Holmes moved to Savannah, he found that the public golf course was available to Negroes only one day a week, and then did not permit them access to such facilities as the rest rooms and the snack bar. Those were conditions that would put any Holmes off his game, So Oliver Holmes worked out a plan with the mayor whereby the course was at first open to Negroes two days a week, with the use of all facilities, and then, a couple of months later, was completely desegregated. The golf-course desegregation worked out so smoothly that the mayor appointed Holmes to the Park Board, which put him in a good position to work on the integration of the parks. While he was in Savannah, he also worked with the mayor to get the library quietly desegregated and headed the N.A.A.C.P. negotiations committee that, with the aid of a year-long boycott, effected the desegregation of the lunch counters in downtown Savannah department stores. When a human-relations council was formed in Savannah, Holmes was the logical choice for co-chairman. “We usually try to have co-chairmen, to insure the participation of both races,” he told me. “It’s always easy to find a Negro co-chairman but sometimes not a white. So I was the co-co-chairman for a while.” Holmes eventually decided to leave the pulpit for a full-time job with the Georgia Council, which, he said, “does a little troubleshooting around the state.” He went on to explain, “We try to see if we can’t get the whites and Negroes to sit down and talk. We try to stress reason rather than force.”
When I visited Holmes in Atlanta, he had just returned from a little troubleshooting at Jekyll Island, a state-owned resort whose facilities Negroes believed to be not only separate but distinctly unequal. “They have a sign up at the Negro end saying ‘Site of Proposed Golf Course,’ ” Holmes said. “They’ve been proposing that golf course for three years now. The first time I tried the white golf course, they put out a sign, ‘Closed for Watering.’ I never heard of a course being closed for watering. You just turn on a hose and water it. Finally, they said they did not allow Negroes to use the course.” Holmes had then started appearing before the State Park Commission to argue for the desegregation of Jekyll Island. “I saw the Director of State Parks at this hearing,” Holmes went on. “He said he lived down in Albany, and he asked me, ‘With all this trouble down there, how do you explain it that I’ve got a hundred and sixty Negroes working for me, and they’re just as happy as they can be? They tell me so.’ I explained it. I said, ‘You got yourself a hundred and sixty of the biggest liars in the state of Georgia.’ ”
Holmes said that the rest of the Holmes family had always been active in civil rights in one way or another. “My father has always been active in the N.A.A.C.P. in a financial way,” he told me. “He’s never had time for any other. Of course, since he met golf he’s never had time for much of anything. Hamp’s daddy always thought he was entitled to what other people were entitled to, and, unlike some Negroes, he always spoke out. In fact, he always shouted it from the rooftops.” Oliver Holmes had arranged for Hamilton to make a speech to the Savannah Human Relations Council the weekend before and had gone along to introduce him. When I told him that I had heard Hamilton speak at Emmanuel Church, and had unexpectedly heard a speech from Dr. Holmes as well, Holmes laughed and said, “I’ve been asked to preach twice since I left the ministry, and both times I took my daddy with me. Both times, they asked him to say a few words after the sermon, and both times he gave a better speech than I did. He really killed me. The second time, the fellow behind me said right out loud, so I could hear, ‘That’s the one who should be preaching.’ I told Daddy next time I got an invitation I wasn’t going to tell him about it. When I heard that he spoke in the church where Hamp spoke, I said, ‘I hope he didn’t kill Hamp like he killed me.’ ”
Although Hamilton’s high school record indicated that he was likely to have an outstanding academic career at Georgia, he was found unqualified before he went to court, and not, said the officials, because he was a Negro. Shortly before the trial in Athens federal court in December of 1960, at which I first met Charlayne and Hamilton, the university Registrar and Director of Admissions, Walter Danner, having considered the interviews with both students, wrote Charlayne that she would be considered for admission the following fall—there was no room for transfer students in her category before then—and wrote Hamilton that he had been rejected on the basis of his interview. Hamilton, the Registrar said, had been “evasive” in answering the questions put to him by the three-man panel, and had left its members in “some doubt as to his truthfulness.” As Hollowell later brought out in the trial, these were almost exactly the same reasons that a special interviewing board had given eight years before for deciding that Horace Ward was unqualified to be a lawyer and should therefore be rejected by the University of Georgia Law School. (Ward had gone on to Northwestern Law School, had returned to join Hollowell’s office in Atlanta, and must have derived a good deal of satisfaction from assisting Hollowell and Mrs. Motley in the trial, not to mention escorting Hamilton into the admissions office to register a month later.) The charge of untruthfulness was based on Hamilton’s having given a negative reply to the board’s question of whether or not he had ever been arrested. The admissions office, Danner said in court, just happened to know that Hamilton had once been fined and had had his license suspended for speeding, and the office considered that an arrest.
Before the trial, Mrs. Motley and three assistants spent two weeks going through the Georgia admissions files, which had been opened by court order. By comparing the treatment given Charlayne and Hamilton with that given other students, they had no difficulty in demonstrating that the whole business was a subterfuge, that the only real category the university had was white, and that the interviewers were less interested in Hamilton’s speeding ticket than in the impossibility of stalling him any longer by claiming that the dormitories were overcrowded, since university rules permitted male students to live off campus after their freshman year. In any event, the housing problem was not so acute that the university had to refrain from sending a dean of the agriculture school to upstate New York that year to recruit students for its food-technology program Moreover, the interview that had been considered so important in Hamilton’s case was given to some students after they were already attending the university. The university, then, had been double-dealing for a year and a half, and it was instructive to see the double-dealing presented as a legal defense by a state that had vowed open resistance to integration. In the effort to correct the false notion that the South has a monopoly on bigotry, the equally false notion has been created that the North has a monopoly on hypocrisy, and I had often heard it said that “in the South at least everybody knows where he stands and people are honest about it.” According to this way of thinking, the resistance promised on the campaign stump by politicians should have been continued in court by state officials. But the university officials I listened to for a week in Athens, testifying about their overcrowded dormitories and their administrative problems, sounded less like Southerners fighting a holy crusade than like Long Island real-estate brokers trying to wriggle out of an anti-discrimination law. After one has spent a few minutes listening to a desegregation trial, the reason for this shift becomes clear. It is a simple matter of law. In federal court, where the case must be tried, the issue has already been decided: segregation in the public schools is unconstitutional. The only possible defense is that segregation does not exist. When politicians say they will resist integration “by all legal means,” they can only be implying that they will try to prolong litigation by any available dodge, since the issue has already been settled by all legal means. In Georgia, in 1960, a trial had to be held. It was demanded by what had evolved into a ritual of combatting integration even when it was obvious that the combat would do no good.
In a state whose highest officials were declaring daily that there would be no integration, a state that had a law on the books establishing that funds would be cut off from any school that was integrated, a state whose governor had promised in his campaign that “not one, no, not one” Negro would ever attend classes with whites in Georgia, Omer Clyde Aderhold, the president of the University of Georgia, had the following exchange with the state’s own lawyer, B. D. Murphy:
The Chancellor of the University System was Harmon W. Caldwell, a respected former president of the university. He had sworn in the Horace Ward trial that he would recommend admission of a qualified Negro, and now he had to read in court a note he had sent to Aderhold on that subject. The note, attached to a letter requesting Caldwell to use his influence to get a white girl into the university, had been found in the admissions files by one of Mrs. Motley’s assistants. It read, “I have written Howard [Howard Calloway, a member of the Board of Regents] that it is my understanding that all of the dormitories for women are filled for the coming year. I have also indicated that you relied on this fact to bar the admission of a Negro girl from Atlanta. . . .”
Although the spectacle of Aderhold and Caldwell in court was a particularly sad example of what The Ritual can lead to, it was by no means unusual. In one brief, Georgia’s lawyers denied “the existence of any policy, practice, or custom of limiting admission to the University of Georgia to white persons.” Nor was this form of defense restricted to higher education, where it sounded relatively plausible. Early in the case that brought about the integration of the Atlanta public schools, the defense claimed that the schools were not actually segregated; it was mere chance that resulted in there being all Negro teachers and students in some schools and all white teachers and students in others. At some point in every higher-education case, Mrs. Motley, who has handled practically all such cases for the Inc. Fund, always asks the university registrar what she calls “the old clincher”: Would he favor the admission of a qualified Negro to the university? The registrar, often a strong segregationist himself, has to answer yes, as Danner did during the Georgia trial, and face the newspaper stories the next day that begin, as the Atlanta Journal’s began, “The University . . . registrar has testified in Federal Court here that he favors admission of qualified Negroes to the University.”
When I mentioned this to Mrs. Motley one evening in New York before I made my return trip to Georgia, she said, “It’s not funny, really. The system is based on people getting on the stand and telling the truth. But people who talk about their respect for tradition and integrity and the Constitution get involved in one lie after another. They’re willing to break down the system to keep a Negro out. In Mississippi, university officials got up on the stand and said they had never even discussed the Meredith case. They do the same kind of thing in voting cases. People are denied the right to vote not because they’re Negroes but because they didn’t dot an ‘i’ or interpret the Constitution correctly. This is one of the most serious by-products of segregation. The people get a disregard for the law. They see supposedly important people get up day after day on the stand and lie. The reason the whole thing seems funny to watch is that you spend all that time proving something everybody already knows.”
To anybody who had sat through the trial in the Athens Federal Building to the reporters, who sat in the jury box, or to the university and town people, who segregated themselves by race the first day or two, even though they were in a federal court, and only gradually got used to sitting wherever there was a place—it was no surprise to read Judge BootIe’s decision that “although there is no written policy or rule excluding Negroes, including plaintiffs, from admission to the University on account of their race or color, there is a tacit policy to that effect,” and that the plaintiffs “would already have been admitted had it not been for their race and color.” However, BootIe’s decision, issued one Friday afternoon in early January, 1961, a month after the trial ended, did contain one surprise; it ordered the students admitted not by the following fall, as had been predicted, or for the spring quarter, beginning in March, but, if they so desired, for the winter quarter, for which registration closed the following Monday.
If the entire conspiracy against the State of Georgia had indeed stemmed from the intricate machinations of a foreign-looking man in New York, he could have picked no better place than the University of Georgia for the first confrontation, so it was ironic that this, the most cunning maneuver of all, was the result of two local accidents—the accident that the University of Georgia case got through the courts faster than the Atlanta school case, which had been filed two years earlier, and the accident that two seventeen-year-old high-school students happened to prefer the University of Georgia to Georgia State, probably because of the football team. There is no doubt that by 1961 the atmosphere in Georgia had benefited from the dismal example of other Southern states, and that the movement to keep the schools open, even with some desegregation, had spread from its normal base, consisting of housewives, to the ordinarily timid businessman. The open-school movement became almost respectable after a fact-finding commission, created by the Georgia legislature, more or less as a part of The Ritual, to gather opinion on segregation around the state, had submitted a surprising majority report urging that each community be given a choice of whether to close its schools or submit to desegregation. Still, most observers thought that if the first test came in the Atlanta high schools in September of 1961, as was expected, the result would be about the same as the result in New Orleans the year before. The Georgia legislature, dominated by representatives of the rural counties, might have enjoyed closing the Atlanta schools, or at least harassing them, in the name of the folks at home. Closing the University of Georgia, where many of the legislators had gone to school, was a different matter. The university, ninety per cent Georgian, customarily had students from every county—no slight achievement in a state with a hundred and fifty-nine counties—and its graduates often went right back where they came from. The spell of the university was once explained to me by William Tate, its dean of men, who has been there for forty years and exchanges more affection with the university than any other man in the state. “When integration came, the university was the one institution that could weather It,” Tate said. “There came a time when the people of the State of Georgia wanted the university not to close. A lot of people in the state love the university, and the university has always been tied up to the state. We usually have people here from every county—though sometimes we fudge a little to get one from Echols County or some little bitty place like that. We also have five hundred agricultural-extension workers and home-demonstration workers spread out all over the state. Our agriculture people have borne the brunt of shifting from a cotton economy to diversified farming. Ernest Vandiver, the last governor, was a graduate of the university. Carl Sanders, the present governor, is a graduate of the university. Both United States senators—Talmadge and Russell—are graduates of the university. Herman Talmadge’s son is here and he is the fourth generation of Talmadges to attend the university. Richard Russell went here; his father was a trustee; his uncle was here. Why, he was the fourth Richard B. Russell here. I went down to speak in Greenville not long ago, and nine graduates came to hear me speak. Nine graduates right there in Meriwether County. It’s not that way with Tech. The engineers don’t drift back to these little old counties. There’s not a soul in Meriwether County who gives a damn what happens to Tech. When this thing happened, I bet a lot of folks said, ‘Hell, I get griped up a lot with that university. The students don’t behave so well. I don’t like the football. But it’s a pretty good old university. It’s helped us. They’ve done the best they can. They got their feet on the ground. And my granddaddy went there. I’ll help them out.’ ”
If, by chance, there was a politician in Georgia at the time who would not have agreed with Dean Tate’s interpretation, he could look at the record. The only political defeat of Eugene Talmadge, a Georgia graduate and one of the South’s most adroit demagogues, came when he meddled with the university. That was in 1941, when the Board of Regents refused to fire a dean whom Governor Talmadge suspected of integrationist sympathies. Talmadge installed a new Board of Regents, which fired the dean, but a good number of angry teachers left as well, and the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools suspended the accreditation of all Georgia’s public colleges and universities—called the University System—because of the political interference. In the next campaign, fought largely on the education issue, Talmadge could not shout about race loud enough to avoid an overwhelming defeat by Ellis Arnall, a liberal. Accreditation was restored, and a simple lesson was learned—that the voters of Georgia cared more for their universIty than for their segregation.
Although, as was later revealed, Governor Vandiver had advisers who thought he should make the gesture of going to jail before permitting the university to admit Charlayne and Hamilton (he had, after all, promised “not one, no, not one”), there was never much doubt about what the Governor would do or how the legislature, then gathering for its annual session in Atlanta, would react. On the day Charlayne and Hamilton registered, Vandiver finally announced that he would have to cut off the university’s funds, because the law required him to, but that he would ask the legislature to change the law. (The university planned to declare a five-day “holiday” while this was being arranged.) He must have been thankful that Judge Bootles enjoined him the next day from using the law, for this move provided him with the opportunity to rail against the tyrannical federal judiciary for doing something he would otherwise have had to do himself. Later, Vandiver offered the legislature his alternative to resistance: repeal of the segregation laws, and the passage of a new group of laws, built around a state tuition grant to parents who wanted to send their children to private schools rather than integrated public schools. According to The Ritual, Vandiver could not call this retreat a retreat. He called it, instead, “the child-protection freedom-of-association defense package.” It passed easily.
When I returned to Atlanta two and a half years later, I was curious about the outcome of all the legislative and judicial activity that had gone on during the integration. I noticed in back issues of the Atlanta Constitution that B. D. Murphy, Georgia’s chief counsel at the Athens trial, eventually presented a bill to the state for $14,500, plus $248 in expenses. The total bill for outside counsel for the Georgia trial, exclusive of the ordinary expenses of the Georgia Attorney General’s office, was something over $25,000. “The state got off cheap,” an enlightened lawyer, wise in the ways of Georgia politics, told me during my visit. “It’s just a matter of who loses gracefully, of course. But this way the issue is settled. They got the best lawyer they thought they could get, he lost, and nobody can say that the case was thrown or the state should have had more lawyers or that somebody else might have won.” Governor Vandiver’s “child-protection freedom-of-association defense package” turned out to be an even costlier form of The Ritual. The tuition-grant law—“the basis of our defense,” according to the Governor—could not mention segregation without being thrown out by the courts; it therefore merely provided a grant enabling any child to attend an approved private school. But, as it happened, not everybody in Georgia was willing to go along with the game. A number of citizens took the law at its word and claimed the grant it provided them, even though they did not live in an integrated school district, and even though, in most cases, their children were in private schools anyway. The week I arrived in Atlanta, the Constitution printed the names of twelve hundred Georgians who had received tuition grants for the 1962-63 school year—the first year the grants were available. The Constitution pointed out that eighty-three per cent of the people had had their children enrolled in private schools before the law was passed. Among those listed were hundreds of people outside Atlanta, which has the only integrated schools in the state, and a Negro educator in Atlanta, who was sending his children North to prep school; one suspects that the list also included dozens of smiling integrationists. The Constitution soberly printed letters from outraged citizens who pointed out that the total cost of the tuition grants, $215,000, was a lot of money to be handed out by a state that regularly ranks among the last in the country in money spent for public education. The legislature, equally alarmed, changed the law so that a parent could apply for a tuition grant only if the school board and the county authority of his district had agreed that a “need” existed in the district. Even then, the request had to go through the local board, and the grant had to be paid partly from local funds “We expect this will cut this business down to nothing,” a legislative assistant at the Capitol told me. That seemed to be the ideal arrangement for a law that was part of The Ritual; it would remain on the books for all to see but could not be used enough to become expensive or embarrassing.
I also discovered, to my surprise, that Georgia still maintains a program of grants to Negro students who go outside the state to take courses offered at one of the “white” institutions in the Georgia University System but not at one of the colleges it provides for Negroes. The out-of-state aid program was originated to give some semblance of “separate but equal” status to a system that offered whites two large universities, a medical school, and a dozen other colleges across the state and offered Negroes three liberal-arts colleges that were once summed up easily by Tup Holmes as “a joke.” Although Negroes can now legally attend any college in the system, the out-of-state aid program is still going forward, perhaps to hold down the attendance of Negroes at colleges still considered white. (Charlayne could have received out-of-state aid for studying journalism out of the state during her last two years in college.) The students annually receive the difference between the tuition they pay outside the state and what they would pay at a Georgia college, plus the equivalent of one round-trip railway coach ticket and a room-and-board supplement of $2.78 a week The records for the 1961-62 school year, which are the latest available, show that fourteen hundred and twenty-five students were given out-of-state aid for study in thirty-four major fields at eighty-one institutions. Nine hundred and twenty-five of these students were majoring in education. The total cost in 1961-62 was $236,124.73, and the estimate for the next school year was about the same. In the 1962-63 school year, then, Georgia, through tuition grants and out-of-state aid, was spending between four hundred thousand and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the ritualistic protection of a custom that had already been violated. And that was in addition to the cost of maintaining two separate school systems.
The University of Georgia was desegregated with unusual suddenness. Only a weekend separated Judge Bootles’ surprise order and the appearance of Charlayne and Hamilton on the campus—not enough time for either the side of law or the side of violence to marshal its forces. A succession of contradictory or ambiguous court orders and executive acts added to the confusion. At one point, Judge BootIe stayed his own order, to allow time for an appeal, only to have Elbert Tuttle, chief judge of the Fifth Circuit, rescind the stay within a couple of hours. From the vague statements of Governor Vandiver and the refusal of President Aderhold to say anything at all, there was some doubt whether the university would remain open or not. The result of all the confusion was three relatively non-violent, if chaotic, days on campus for Charlayne and Hamilton, and a spate of congratulations to the university from television newscasters and Northern newspapers on how well everybody had behaved. Some of the undergraduates at Georgia had spent the weekend rounding up signatures for petitions to keep the university open—the dominant concern of most students. Others had engaged in some minor effigy and cross burning, including a sorry demonstratIon I witnessed on the football practice field the Saturday night before Charlayne and Hamilton arrived. Twenty-odd students wanted to burn a cross made of two-by-fours, but, owing to a lack of kerosene and a lack of experience in this kind of endeavor, they were unable to get it ablaze. Most of the demonstrations against integration during the two new students’ first three days on the campus seemed to be in that tradition. When Charlayne and Hamilton showed up at nine o’clock Monday morning, they were met only by a small group of curious students and a few reporters. In fact, throughout the first day, as Hamilton and his father and Horace Ward walked around campus going through the registration process, they often met with nothing more than some stares or a muttered “Hey, there’s that nigger.” The crowds around Charlayne were larger, but they seemed almost playful, even when they began to bounce a car she was riding in, or swarmed into the Academic Building, where she was registering, to yell “2-4-6-8! We don’t want to integrate!”—a chant they had borrowed from the women screaming at six-year-olds outside the integrated schools in New Orleans. A large crowd, triggered by a speech of Vandiver’s that seemed to say the school would close, marched through downtown Athens on Monday night behind a Confederate flag. On Tuesday night, the first night Charlayne spent on campus, some of those who had found out which dormitory she had been assigned to—Center Myers—gathered on the street in front of it to chant, push around some television cameramen there, and throw some firecrackers. It was a rowdier crowd, but, like the rest, it was broken up by Dean Tate, who, working singlehanded, confiscated some university identification cards and told some of the boys he knew to go home.
In a special issue of the campus newspaper Tuesday, ten student leaders issued a warning that violence could only mar the image of the university. By Wednesday, just about everybody on the campus knew there was a riot scheduled in front of Charlayne’s dormitory after the basketball game that night. It had been organized by a number of law-school students. All day Wednesday, the organizers scurried around making plans and bragging about the promises of help and immunity they had received from legislators. Some students got dates for the basketball game and the riot afterward. Reporters, faculty members, and even some students warned Joseph Williams, the dean of students, about the riot and suggested that he ban gatherings in front of the dormitory, or at least cancel the basketball game. But Williams said that neither step was necessary. Just after ten, a small crowd of students gathered on the lawn In front of Center Myers and unfurled a bedsheet bearing the legend “Nigger Go Home.” Then three or four of them peeled off from the group, ran toward the dormitory, and flung bricks and Coke bottles through the window of Charlayne’s room. Dean Tate had been assigned by Williams to remain with the crowd at the gymnasium after the basketball game, and Williams himself, standing in front of the crudely lettered sign, made no attempt to break up the group. As more people came up the hill from the basketball game—a close loss to Georgia Tech—and a few outsiders showed up, the mob grew to about a thousand, many of whom threw bricks, rocks, and firecrackers. The few Athens policemen present were busy directing traffic, and after about thirty minutes Williams finally agreed to let a reporter phone the state police, who had a barracks outside Athens. Although the university understood that thirty state troopers would be standing ready in the barracks, the desk sergeant said that he could not send the troopers without the permission of the captain. But the captain said he had to have authority from the Commissioner of Public Safety, and the Commissioner, in turn, said he could not make a move without an order from the Governor. (In a failure of communications that still fascinates students of Georgia backroom shenanigans, it was so long before the Governor gave the order that the state police did not arrive until an hour after the riot was over and two hours and twenty minutes after they were called. Then a carload of them came to take Charlayne and Hamilton back to Atlanta.)
The riot was finally broken up by the arrival, together, of Dean Tate, who waded in and started grabbing identification cards, and of more Athens cops, who started fighting back when they were pushed, and then drove everybody away with tear gas. It had been a nasty riot, but the group courage that sometimes comes to mobs had never infected it. Although the students could have stormed the dormitory several times without meeting any effective defense, they never did. A few hours after the television newscasters had congratulated Georgia on its behavior, the area around Center Myers looked like a deserted battlefield, with bricks and broken glass on the lawn, small brush fires in the woods below the dormitory, and the bite of tear gas still in the air. The casualties were several injured policemen, a girl on the second floor who had been scratched by a rock, and, as it turned out, the university’s reputation. Dean Williams suspended Charlayne and Hamilton, informing them that it was “for your own safety and the safety of almost seven thousand other students,” and they were driven back to Atlanta. Williams’ on-the-spot decision to suspend the target of the mob, rather than those in the mob itself, seemed unrelated to anybody’s safety, since it was made after the last rioter had gone home and after university and Athens officials had assured Williams that order had been restored and that giving in to the mob would only mean going through the whole experience again. Dean Williams and Charlayne, who was crying by this time and clutching a statue of the Madonna, walked right out of the front door of Center Myers into the state-police car, watched only by a few straggling reporters.
From the moment the two arrived on campus, Charlayne attracted much more attention than Hamilton. At the time, some onlookers explained this by devising complicated anthropological theories about the greater interest in the enemy female. Others said it was only natural that unfriendly students should believe the girl more likely to be frightened away by their presence and that friendly students should think her more in need of their support. Dean Tate’s answer is that it was merely a matter of convenience. He calculated that two or three times during the day there were two thousand students within two hundred yards of Charlayne, whose classes at the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism kept her on the busiest part of the campus, whereas there were far fewer students around the science center (which is removed from the main campus), where Hamilton spent most of the week. The fact that Charlayne took a dormitory room, while Hamilton moved in with a Negro family in Athens, made the difference even greater. Then, after the riot, stories about it, including a widely published picture of Charlayne leaving the dormitory in tears, made her better known to people outside Athens as well. The immediate result of Charlayne’s publicity was that in her first week or two at Georgia she received about a thousand letters—three or four times the number Hamilton got—from all over the United States and several foreign countries. Charlayne’s mother filed all the letters by states, the Georgia and New York folders ending up the fattest, and later sent each of the writers a reprint of an article Charlayne wrote about her experience for a now defunct Negro magazine called the Urbanite. I was interested in seeing just what people wrote in such letters, and during my trip this spring I borrowed the folders from Mrs. Hunter, who has them stored in a big pasteboard box. Charlayne told me later that the University of Georgia library would like to have the letters eventually but that she hesitated to give them up, especially while some of the writers might be embarrassed by even a historian’s perusal of their names and opinions. That was an understandable objection, I thought, but it did seem like the justice of scholarship for the university to end up with nearly a thousand expressions of outrage at its behavior. There were only fifteen or twenty abusive letters, I discovered, and this surprised me, but I was more surprised to find that most of the particularly foul ones were from the North. The unfriendly letters from the South, even if they were written in the guise of kindly advice, were instantly recognizable, since in almost every case they contained no conventional salutation. “Dear Charlayne” would have been too chummy, and anybody willing to say “Miss Hunter” apparently would not have written a letter in the first place. Most of the writers solved the problem by starting out with a flat “Charlayne Hunter,” as if they were beginning a formal proclamation. There were also surprisingly few crank letters, although some of the writers were obviously just lonely people who wanted somebody to write to, and a few of the letters, like one from Italy that began, “Dear Little Swallow,” reflected emotions other than sympathy. A number were from Negro undergraduates (their own experiences with separate but equal education revealed in their spelling) who sent along a picture and hoped that a correspondence might develop. Many of the writers told Charlayne they were praying for her; many of the Catholics mentioned her conversion to Catholicism. She received dozens of prayer cards, copies of sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, Seventh Day Adventist tracts, and two books by Gandhi. Several letters were from college student councils or N.A.A.C.P. chapters that had taken resolutions supporting Charlayne and deploring the action of those who persecuted her. Most of the letters from individuals also expressed admiration for Charlayne’s “courage and dignity”—the phrase was used almost as one word—and outrage at the mob There was often a mention of helplessness in the letters from Northerners, which included phrases like “This must be small comfort” and “Of course, I can never really understand.” Some of those who believed they could never really understand nevertheless tried to establish their credentials for understanding, listing personal experiences with prejudice or with Negroes. A girl at the University of Connecticut told Charlayne that her high school had a Negro teacher, who was considered by all the students to be the best teacher in the school; the yearbook had been dedicated to him four out of the five years he had been there, she said. A young white woman in West Virginia wrote that she was attending a formerly all-Negro college. “your people are teaching me,” she noted. But the great majority of the letters from the North had no personal experiences to offer. In many of them, a picture of Charlayne cut from a newspaper was enclosed, and most of them seemed to be from sensible, decent people who were appalled by the picture of a pretty girl being bullied by a mob and felt they had to write, even if they didn’t know quite what to say.
The letters from Georgia had a different theme. Many of them were from University of Georgia alumni, who seemed to have a very specific and compelling reason for writing. They wanted to tell Charlayne that all of them were not like the mob or the people who permitted it to form. As I read through their letters, it seemed to me that each person who wrote felt he had to assure Charlayne of that or she might not know. On the whole, of course, the Georgia letters were also more realistic. But none quite captured the plain realism of a young boy in Rochester, New York, one of two dozen pupils in a parochial-school eighth grade who had apparently written to Charlayne as a class project. “Dear Miss Hunter,” he said. “I am very sorry for the way you are being treated. I hope you have the courage to take this treatment in the future. Respectfully yours.”
I had first discussed the letters with Charlayne two years before, when she was back in Atlanta for the weekend after her second week at the university. Since her return to the campus following the riot, she had been under police protection, and in consequence she was now cut off from the rest of the students even more sharply than she had been during the chaotic first week. She seemed amazed and moved by the number of people who had written to her, but she found some of their letters slightly off the subject. “All these people say ‘Charlayne, we just want you to know you’re not alone,’ ” she said, smiling. “But I look all around and I don’t see anybody else.”
Many reasonable people in Georgia, when they look back on what everybody calls “that night,” believe that, all things considered, the riot was both inevitable and beneficial—a nice clean shocker to polarize opinion, revolt decent citizens, and purge the violent of their anger. This line of thinking has never appealed much to Charlayne, who tends to be less dispassionate about the events of that night, but she admits that the reaction to the riot by the state and the university meant that she and Hamilton need no longer have any real fear about their physical safety. About the only public figure in the state who did not express outrage over the riot was Peter Zach Geer, who was then Governor Vandiver’s executive secretary and is now lieutenant governor; instead, he issued a statement, late that night, saying, in part, “The students at the University have demonstrated that Georgia youth are possessed with the character and courage not to submit to dictatorship and tyranny.” Geer now finds those ringing words a political liability. As for Governor Vandiver, with almost everybody else in a mood for law and order, he guaranteed that the peace would be maintained when, under a new court order, Charlayne and Hamilton returned to the campus the following Monday.
In their reactions to the riot, each of the groups involved in the situation—the state’s politicians and the university’s administration, faculty, and students—seemed to set the pattern for their future behavior. The university administration, looking around for somebody else to blame, eventually found the press (the group that had appeared most interested in preventing the riot) and “outsiders,” represented by seven Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who had been arrested in their car on the campus that night. The Klansmen, sullen, ugly, and properly ominous, had been armed, and did afford an indication of what might have happened if the tear gas had not broken up the mob, but, as a matter of fact, they had left their arms in the car and had taken no real part in the riot. Nevertheless, they had guns and bad reputations, and were more logical suspects than respectable law students. Administration officials at first thought that a ban on student demonstrations would be undemocratic, but by the end of the week, finding the pressure for the ban greater than the pressure against it, they established a permanent policy of not putting up with overt hostility.
As for the faculty, it had maintained silence while the administration felt its way through the crisis, but with the riot and the suspension of Charlayne and Hamilton it almost exploded. A meeting was called the night after the riot, and eventually about four hundred faculty members signed a resolution that said, in part, “We insist that the two suspended students be returned to their classes.” It was an extraordinarily strong statement for that time in Georgia; insisting that Negroes attend classes with whites was not a popular view, no matter what the circumstances. But the faculty went unpunished, and even when some professors organized groups to patrol the campus the first few nights Charlayne and Hamilton were back in Athens, there were no reprisals of any sort. The legislators in Atlanta noted the resolution with displeasure but expressed their displeasure in no concrete action. Instead, they set up an investigating committee called “The Special Committee Appointed on the 12th Day of January, 1961, by the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia to Find and Ascertain Facts Concerning the Certain Happenings and Episodes Surrounding the Admission of Two Negro Students to the University of Georgia.” One of the facts the committee found and ascertained was that “the majority of rocks were aimed at Center Myers Dormitory and not at persons.” Another was that “many students feel they are being unduly restrained in exercising their right of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.” But the legislators did not seem terribly interested, and sooner or later most of them actually appeared relieved to be done with this issue that had absorbed so much of their energy.
The pattern of the students’ attitude toward Charlayne and Hamilton emerged during the week of their return. The fraternities and sororities let it be known that anybody interested in his own position on campus would be wise not to talk to the two Negroes. Another group of students, most of them associated in one way or another with Westminster House, the campus Presbyterian organization, formed a group called Students for Constructive Action. They posted signs about the Golden Rule in the classroom buildings and arranged to take turns walking with Charlayne and Hamilton on their way to classes. The girls in Center Myers had all trooped down to visit Charlayne the first night she was in the dormitory, reinforcing a widely held opinion that girls would always be kind to a new girl, even a new Negro girl, but on the following night—that of the riot—their behavior changed drastically. After the first brick and the first Coke bottle had crashed into her room, Charlayne went to a partly partitioned office, ordinarily used by one of the student counsellors, and stayed there during most of what followed. A group of Center Myers coeds soon formed a circle in front of the office and marched around, each screaming an insult as she got to the door. “They had been told to strip their beds, because tear-gas fumes might get into the sheets,” Charlayne said to me later. “They kept yelling that they would give me twenty-five cents to make their beds, although at the hourly rate I was being paid by the N.A.A.C.P., according to them, it wouldn’t have made much sense for me to work for a quarter. They kept yelling, ‘Does she realize she’s causing all this trouble?’ Out of all the girls who had visited me the night before, only one girl came in and stayed in the office with me. But I finally made her go to bed. After a while, Mrs. Porter, the housemother, told me to get my things together, because I was going back to Atlanta, and that’s when I started to cry. Dean Williams carried my books and my suitcase, which was pretty nice. He could have made me carry them. When we went by to pick up Hamp, he wanted to drive his own car back. I guess by then my imagination was running wild; I could imagine K.K.K. all up and down the highway. I didn’t want Hamp to drive, and I almost got hysterical. Finally, he said O.K., he’d go with the troopers. Dean Tate went with us, and talked all the way back about the little towns we went through—things like why ‘Dacula’ is pronounced ‘Dacula,’ Instead of ‘Dacula.’ The next day, at home, the lights were low, and people kept coming by saying how sorry they were. It felt as if I had been ill for a long time and was about to go, or as if somebody had already died. I was going back to Athens, but I was glad we didn’t have to go back for two or three days.” ♦