I wrote the following essay as my entry in the Silver Arts essay competition for the 2007 Johnston County (NC) Senior Games. It won first prize. I had the privilege of a Facebook contact this week from one of the two heroes about whom I wrote, so decided this was a good time to post this one. Charlayne Hunter Gault continues to be a real hero for me. When I was a shy student who was too self-absorbed to attempt great things she was a true fighter in the quest for justice and civil rights in this country. I have always been inspired by her example.
I Was There
The recent tragic events at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 brought back to me memories of a crisis-time in my own college experience, when my classmates and I found ourselves caught up in one of the hallmark events of the American civil rights struggle. That event was the racial integration of the University of Georgia in Athens, about 75 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Momentous events in the civil rights struggle in the South had been taking place since the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. In February 1956, at the University of Alabama, Governor George Wallace personally denied entrance to Miss Autherine Lucy, in a much-publicized confrontation at the front steps. That evening students opposing her admission rioted, and in a short while she had been withdrawn “for her own safety.” By 1960 no university in the Deep South had been integrated.
In the Spring of 1959 two African-American students, Hamilton Earl Holmes, and Charlayne Alberta Hunter, both graduates of Turner High School in Atlanta, began the application process to enter the University of Georgia, at the encouragement of civil rights leaders in the Atlanta area. But the University avoided admitting them by employing various delaying tactics through the Fall quarter of 1960. In the meantime Mr. Holmes, who had plans to become a medical doctor, had enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and Miss Hunter had enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, while awaiting the outcome of their efforts to enter the University of Georgia.
Early in her high school career Miss Hunter had aspired to become a journalist, and she became heavily involved in work with her high school newspaper. Coincidentally, after a lackluster high school career to that point, in my senior year at Hapeville High School, in the shadow of the Atlanta Municipal Airport, I also caught the journalism bug. For the first time I began discovering talents in myself that hitherto had been hidden, and won a number of national, state, and local high school journalism awards for my writing in our high school newspaper, the Hornet. My teachers encouraged me to enroll in the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady School of Journalism. I applied in the Spring of 1960, was soon accepted without delay (unlike the two Black students), and arrived in Athens on September 24, 1960. Within two weeks I was appointed Editor of the freshman class newspaper, the Pink and Gray.
During Christmas break in Atlanta, a number of things were happening on the civil rights front in Georgia. Locally, there were lunch-counter demonstrations in many of the popular eating-places as families did their Christmas shopping. Atlanta’s buses were still segregated, with Whites sitting in front and Blacks in the rear. Any person sensitive to the requirements of justice was often confronted with the ethical decision of deciding where the dividing lines were located whenever he or she got on a crowded bus. This was especially a problem for me, because I had always been somewhat sensitive to fair play and justice, and always tried to be careful not to step on the rights of Black or White persons.
Even though most of my friends, and nearly all of my family, had long believed in segregation, I was becoming increasingly disturbed by the unfairness of the system, and by Christmastime of 1960 my conscience was getting the better of me. I was ashamed of the more flagrant insults that people of my race were throwing at Blacks, who desired only basic human rights and respect for human dignity that all people deserved. I felt more and more a sense of guilt that I and my family and friends were inheritors of advantages that other human beings could not lawfully even hope to have under a system of segregation.
Separate eating facilities and water fountains and sitting arrangements in buses seemed to me totally absurd. And the idea that Blacks, who worked as hard as my own parents, and who had paid their taxes to the same state government that my parents did, could not send their sons and daughters to an institution as fine as the one I was now privileged to attend—that just seemed terribly unfair and unjust to me. I had not yet summoned the courage to express in public my feelings about these things, but they were becoming quite real to me, and my silence was about to end.
During that same Christmas break the crisis was approaching in Athens, too. On Friday December 29, 1960, the newspapers announced the court order to admit Mr. Holmes and Miss Hunter at the beginning of the Winter Quarter. And on Friday, January 6, 1961, with the issuance of US District Court Judge William A. Bootle’s historic ruling that found that the University of Georgia had used race as the determinant in excluding Mr. Holmes and Miss Hunter from admission, the long struggle to integrate the state’s institutions of higher education began to see light. On Tuesday, January 10, 1961, the University finally admitted both of them as transfer students.
My dad drove me back to campus on Saturday, January 7, and I was glad to be back. Somehow, after being on my own in Athens, my home in the little Atlanta suburb of Hapeville was just plain boring. During the next couple of days I heard from others about a cross-burning on or near campus, and about small demonstrations in which Hamilton Holmes was burned in effigy. There was also talk that the current Georgia law would force the University to close, because funds would have to be cut off if the University integrated. However, my registration was uneventful, and the first day of classes, Wednesday January 11, turned out to be rather “normal” for me until late that evening. I had not encountered either of the two new students, nor had I expected to do so.
That evening Georgia Tech played Georgia in basketball, in our old stadium, just around the corner from my dormitory, Milledge Hall. The old stadium was so dilapidated that it had the reputation of being “the only stadium in the Southeastern Conference in which wind was a deciding factor in the game.” I was not a basketball fan at the time, and did not attend, but stayed in my dorm room, just reading. I could hear the noises from the stadium, however, and toward the end of the evening, as the game broke up, following a severe loss to Tech, the noise got louder, and then died down. I had listened to part of the game on radio, just to check out the scores, and soon heard a news report about disturbances on campus. If I had heard any advance rumors from classmates about the possibility of trouble that evening, I probably discounted them.
Miss Holmes had been assigned to Center Myers Dormitory on North Campus, about a mile from the stadium area. Following the game, a crowd of about a thousand, both students and non-students, gathered on Lumpkin Street, in front of her room in the dorm, and began shouting epithets, exploding fireworks, and throwing rocks and bricks, some of which broke the windows in her room. At least one female student was injured by a rock. The demonstration lasted several hours, and Athens police were unable to control the crowd. Highway Patrol officers, stationed in an area off campus in case of trouble, failed to respond for two hours after being contacted. Initial news reports indicated that the demonstrations were spontaneous. Later investigations suggested that they were planned in advance with the intent of imitating the successful 1956 defeat of the integration attempt at the University of Alabama.
I well remember going down to my dormitory lobby about midnight, and encountering a classmate who had just come back from the demonstration at Myers. He was clearly elated by the events. I myself was disturbed. I recall asking him something like, “If Jesus Christ could have seen you tonight, how do you think He would have reacted?” I will never forget his reply to me: “I don’t know anything about that! All I know is that my daddy taught me to hate [N-word]s, so I hate [N-word]s!” That will probably go down as the stupidest comment I ever heard delivered during my years at the University of Georgia. I remember thinking at the time that this young man had come to college for an education, but that, apparently, he had learned nothing useful so far.
Sometime after midnight Miss Hunter and Mr. Holmes were suspended “for their own safety,” and University authorities transported them off campus back to their homes in Atlanta. The University closed all classes until further notice. Most of the students left campus and returned to their homes. As we students on campus waited in uncertainty, about three-fourths of the University’s faculty members courageously published a statement condemning the violence, and pleading for the University to re-open. The campus newspaper, the Red and Black, courageously published an editorial the next day blasting the demonstrators. The Pink and Gray followed suit. University officials awaited a decision from the Governor as to whether funds would be cut off if the University did re-open. A courageous Governor, Ernest Vandiver, decided, even in the face of massive opposition from the legislature, to ignore the Georgia law that had required cutoff of funds, and both he and Federal Judge Bootle ordered the University to re-open the following Monday. After that decision, Governor Vandiver was never again elected to public office.
Over the weekend University officials published a notice to everyone on campus, calling attention to city ordinances banning demonstrations and the use of fireworks without a permit, and, in what I thought was a brilliant stroke, notifying members of fraternities and sororities that, should their members be caught violating those ordinances, their fraternities or sororities could lose their charters. Faculty members also volunteered to form a night patrol of campus areas, sort of a forerunner of modern “neighborhood watch” programs, to report immediately any signs of trouble. On Monday January 16, 1961 classes resumed. Tensions remained high for a short while, but no further demonstrations occurred. FBI agents arrested four armed men before they could harm anyone, and a recently released mental patient with a gun attempted to enter Myers dormitory, but was apprehended, again before anyone was hurt.
Eventually, I switched majors from journalism to English, and therefore I never had any classes with Miss Hunter, although occasionally I would see her from a distance. I never met either student, but I have looked on both with great respect and admiration for their courage during those days. I have also been encouraged as I remember that nine-tenths of the student body did not participate in the disturbances of 1961.
I recall myself as being very self-absorbed for the most part, and very shy, but at the same time angry and disturbed when injustice occurred anywhere. I wish I had done more to stand up for justice and fairness in those days. But I did what little I could to speak up for, and to speak kindly about, Charlayne and Hamilton, my classmates, and in the intervening years I came ut of my shell, and became more courageous myself in opposing injustice. I like to think my growth has been in part due to their example set so many years ago.
Hamilton Holmes graduated in June 1963, went on to become the first Black student in the medical school of Emory University, a prominent orthopedic surgeon and Chief of Staff of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, and a Trustee of the University of Georgia prior to his death in 1995 at age 54. Charlayne Hunter (now Hunter-Gault) also graduated in 1963, and went on to become an outstanding journalist with the New York Times, and with the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour on PBS, and is currently the Africa Bureau Chief for the Cable News Network. As for me, I graduated in 1964, and after two years on active duty as a military personnel officer in the US Army, eventually earned two seminary degrees and became a Baptist minister and later an employment counselor with the State of North Carolina until I retired at the end of the year 2000.
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