Ground Crew: The Fight to End Segregation at Georgia State

Ground Crew

Ground Crew

THE FIGHT TO END SEGREGATION AT GEORGIA STATE

Maurice C. Daniels

© 2019 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Daniels, Maurice Charles, 1952– author.

Title: Ground crew : the fight to end segregation at Georgia State / Maurice C. Daniels.

Description: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018153| ISBN 9780820355955 (hard back : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820355962 (e-book) | ISBN 9780820355979 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Georgia State College of Business Administration— History. | Segregation—Georgia—History—20th century. | African Americans—Civil rights—Georgia—History—20th century. | Civil rights movements—Georgia—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC LD1965 .D34 2019 | DDC 379.2/6309758—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018153

To my father, Eddie Daniels Sr.,

my mother, Maggie C. Daniels,

and the descendants of

Bill and Margie Bogan and

Doc and Lucinda Daniels

Every time I take a flight, I am always mindful of the many people who make a successful journey possible—the known pilots and the unknown ground crew … without whose labor and sacrifices the jets flights to freedom could never have left the earth.

—DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1   Breaking the Color Line

CHAPTER 2   Renewing the Struggle: The Alliance with Atlanta’s Black Institutions and the NAACP

CHAPTER 3   Laying the Groundwork: The Challenge and the Backlash

CHAPTER 4   Hunt v. Arnold: The Trial Begins

CHAPTER 5   The Higher Dictates of Justice and Equity: Judge Sloan’s Verdict

CHAPTER 6   The Struggle Continues

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume is part of a series of books and documentaries produced by the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies (FSP) that includes the book Saving the Soul of Georgia: Donald L. Hollowell and the Struggle for Civil Rights and the public television documentaries Hamilton Earl Holmes: The Struggle Continues and Mary Frances Early: The Quiet Trailblazer.

The FSP chronicles the lives and stories of those foot soldiers for equal justice whose names may not be familiar but whose activism helped bring about sweeping social change in our nation’s history. Such work helps to illustrate how social change and social reform result from the hard work and dedication not only of the few celebrated historical figures whose names are preserved but also of the countless individuals whose contributions, though unrecognized, are nevertheless crucial.

In many ways, I was influenced to help create the FSP by my father, Eddie Daniels Sr., and the black community in my hometown of Rochelle, Georgia. My dad served as principal of the Excelsior Elementary and High School in Rochelle—the segregated school for black children. In solidarity with other local black citizens, he successfully circumnavigated the barriers of the Jim Crow system and led the transformation of an under-resourced, moribund, two-room wood-clad school, which used hand-me-down books and recycled buses, to develop one of the great bastions of education in Georgia during the 1950s and 1960s.

The heroic, unsung activism and great moral courage of my father and other citizens of my hometown in the midst of blatant racial oppression helped shape my understanding and appreciation of the power of everyday people to achieve social change. My recollections of their powerful activism, magnificent spirit, and bold determination to improve their lot inspired me to chronicle the stories of unsung activists in the black freedom struggle.

I am indebted to a number of friends and colleagues who contributed directly to making this book possible. Diane H. Miller’s perceptive editorial direction, sharp eye, and meticulousness played a pivotal role in the organization, writing, and completion of this book. I am deeply grateful for her highly skillful editing and wise counsel. I am also appreciative of the editorial guidance of Charles Duncan, who helped me develop the conceptual framework of this manuscript during the writing of my book Horace T. Ward: Desegregation of the University of Georgia, Civil Rights Advocacy, and Jurisprudence. His depth of knowledge of civil rights history and superb editorial assistance have been invaluable.

I owe a great deal to Derrick P. Alridge for his encouragement, stewardship, and generosity with his time and talents in reviewing drafts of this manuscript. He provided indispensable recommendations and guided me to primary and secondary sources that enriched this study. I also thank Maurice J. Hobson and Dwight D. Watson for their scholarly insights and helpful commentary.

Christopher Strickland, FSP graduate research associate, made tremendous contributions to my research for this book. He spent many hours in libraries and archives unearthing historical documents. Christopher’s expert research skills, resourcefulness, and creativity greatly enhanced this research endeavor.

In 2000, the FSP completed the production of the documentary film Horace T. Ward: Foot Soldier for Equal Justice, which chronicled the struggle of Horace T. Ward and the NAACP to break the mantle of segregation in higher education in Georgia. In the research process for this film, my interviewees included NAACP stalwart and business leader Jesse Hill; civil rights lawyers Donald L. Hollowell, Constance Baker Motley, Horace T. Ward, and Vernon E. Jordan Jr.; and Myra Dinsmore, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit to end segregation at Georgia State. Those interviews provided my initial insight into the significance of the Hunt v. Arnold case. I am grateful for the valuable information these individuals shared, which became the foundation of my research for this book.

I am especially grateful to Crystal Freeman, the daughter of Barbara Hunt, who was the lead plaintiff in the Hunt case. Crystal has been a one-person band trumpeting the importance of acknowledging the efforts of plaintiffs and activists in the struggle to desegregate Georgia State. She provided a number of primary- and secondary-source documents that were invaluable in the research process.

I greatly appreciate the support and assistance of a number of archivists and librarians. Archivists at the Atlanta History Center, Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library, the Georgia Department of Archives and History, Georgia State University’s Special Collections, the National Archives—Southeast Region, and the University of Georgia Libraries were especially instructive and helpful. Special thanks to Jill Severn, Christian Lopez, and Sheryl Vogt of the University of Georgia Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies; Courtney Chartier of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; Derek Mosley and Anita Martin of the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History; Victoria Fox of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Kayla Jenkins of the NAACP LDF; Amber Anderson of the Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives Research Center; and Phyllis A. Perry, daughter of trailblazing photographer and journalist Harmon G. Perry.

My deepest gratitude to Mick Gusinde-Duffy, the University of Georgia Press’s executive editor, who read my initial draft of this manuscript, for his encouragement and editorial recommendations. I also appreciate the reviews and tremendously helpful suggestions of the press’s anonymous reviewers of this manuscript. Their cogent editorial recommendations helped me develop a more in-depth scholarly study.

I am grateful for the collective and expert work of Beth Snead, Jon Davies, Lea Johnson, and other able staff of the University of Georgia Press in the publication process. I also thank Barbara Wojhoski for her skillful copyediting and Pamela Gray for her excellent indexing work.

This research was funded, in part, by the J. Alton Gregory Support Fund, created by a gift from chief justice emeritus Hardy Gregory Jr. (Georgia Supreme Court) and Toni Gregory to the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies. Many thanks to Chief Justice Gregory and Toni for their generous support.

My deepest thanks to my wife, Renee, and our daughters, Carrin, Lauren, Nicole, and Maya, for their editorial assistance, love, and support. I thank them for their patience and grace as I burdened them with questions about this book, especially during family vacation time.

Ground Crew

INTRODUCTION

On January 9, 1961, civil rights pioneers Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter broke the 175-year-old color line at Georgia’s flagship university, the University of Georgia, after Judge William Augustus Bootle ordered their admission to the state’s most cherished all-white institution (Holmes v. Danner). Holmes and Hunter were the first black students to enter a white public school, college, or university in the state, a watershed moment that represented a major turning point in Georgia history. Judge Elbert Tuttle of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, ultimately affirmed Bootle’s decree, and the two brilliant and courageous students rightly became icons of the civil rights movement.¹

Holmes and Hunter’s epic battle was won by the nation’s most elite civil rights lawyers—Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, Constance Baker Motley, Jack Greenberg, and emerging civil rights barrister Donald L. Hollow-ell.² Heightening the historic significance and drama of the groundbreaking legal case were the contributions of local attorneys Horace T. Ward and Vernon E. Jordan Jr., whom Hollowell involved in the case. Ward had lost his own protracted legal fight (Ward v. Regents) to enter the University of Georgia School of Law in 1957, after law school dean J. Alton Hosch declared that Ward didn’t show the type of mind … to successfully pursue the study of law.³ Despite Hosch’s condescending contention, Ward subsequently earned his law degree at the prestigious Northwestern University School of Law. In an epic moment of poetic justice, during Holmes and Hunter’s trial Hollowell directed University of Georgia president O. C. Aderhold to reveal to the court that the man Hosch had described as lacking the mind to be a lawyer had not only graduated from Northwestern University law school and passed the bar but was now seated at the lawyer’s table as counsel to Holmes and Hunter.⁴

Vernon Jordan helped the Hollowell legal team examine the admissions records of white students and found a document demonstrating a significant discrepancy in the treatment of Hunter’s application and that of Bebe Brumby. Brumby was the daughter of Otis A. Brumby, a former prominent member of the General Assembly and also a relative of U.S. senator Richard Russell.⁵ Both Hunter and Brumby were transfer applicants interested in journalism. Brumby was courted for entrance and admitted to the university, in contrast to the categorical rejection of Hunter’s and Holmes’s applications, purportedly due to limited dormitory facilities.⁶ However, Jordan discovered that Brumby had applied to the university after Holmes and Hunter submitted their applications. This finding provided incontrovertible evidence supporting Holmes’s and Hunter’s claims of discrimination and figured prominently in Bootle’s triumphant ruling in favor of Holmes and Hunter and the cause of desegregation.⁷

The struggle to desegregate the University of Georgia that culminated in 1961 was covered by America’s most prestigious print and broadcast media outlets and has been chronicled in scholarly and trade publications as well as documentary films.⁸ Yet two years earlier, in Hunt v. Arnold, Barbara Hunt, Myra Dinsmore, and Iris Mae Welch won a groundbreaking federal injunction against the all-white Georgia State College of Business Administration (now Georgia State University) in downtown Atlanta. In contrast to the widespread coverage of the University of Georgia case, the plaintiffs in Hunt v. Arnold, along with local activists involved in the case and the court victory itself, have been virtually ignored in civil rights history. Although the three hidden figures and their local comrades who won the first NAACP victory against segregated education in Georgia helped to establish important legal precedents that figured prominently in the subsequent Holmes case, Holmes has largely overshadowed the Hunt triumph.

In a number of scholarly histories chronicling the struggle for racial equality in Georgia, the Hunt case has been omitted entirely; in those instances where it is examined, the narrative is by and large a mere footnote. This book sheds light on the Georgia State applicants’ arduous struggle and tremendous sacrifices, which established vital groundwork for the Holmes case—the breakthrough that led to the removal of state-sanctioned legal barriers to desegregation in higher education. Not only did the legal precedents established in the Hunt case figure prominently in the Holmes decision, but one year later, in Meredith v. Fair, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals cited the Hunt ruling in upholding the injunction against racial discrimination at the University of Mississippi. The historic Meredith v. Fair ruling led to the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962.⁹

Notably, the Fifth Circuit specifically declared that to the extent that the University of Mississippi relied on the requirement of alumni certifications and recommendations from white alumni, which were ruled unconstitutional in the Hunt case, Meredith was discriminated against in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was unlawfully denied admission.¹⁰ The court went on to declare that the University of Mississippi’s continued insistence on the requirement of white alumni recommendations represented demonstrable evidence of a State and University policy of segregation that was applied to Meredith.¹¹

Meredith made his original inquiry to seek admission just two weeks after Bootle’s federal court order to enroll Holmes and Hunter, a court order that also cited the Hunt decision.¹² Constance Baker Motley, who played a key role in laying the groundwork that led to the Hunt and Holmes legal triumphs, was Meredith’s chief counsel. Motley recounts that Meredith was emboldened by the actions of Holmes and Hunter.¹³

Ground Crew illustrates how the Georgia State case fit into the NAACP’s grand strategy to defeat segregation in higher education. It discusses a number of cases that preceded Hunt, including several U.S. Supreme Court victories the NAACP won against segregated colleges and universities in states outside the Deep South. Despite these triumphs, as the narrative relates, white supremacists in Georgia blatantly ignored the court’s rulings, and many of Georgia’s high-profile politicians led a campaign to sustain segregation in Georgia and across the South.

The narrative also traces how NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF) lawyers worked with local attorneys to chip away at segregation plaintiff by plaintiff, case by case, and state by state.¹⁴ Motley, for example, in addition to representing plaintiffs and working with local counsel in the Ward, Hunt, and Holmes cases in Georgia and the Meredith case in Mississippi, also served as counsel for Autherine Lucy in her epic battle to enter the University of Alabama, shortly before the black applicants initially sought admission to Georgia State.

The book also relates how many of the same key activists and local lawyers who achieved victory in the Holmes case participated in the Hunt case and the earlier Ward case. Importantly, it illustrates the trajectory of the NAACP’s collaboration with local black lawyers and activists, from filing its first lawsuit against segregated education in Georgia in the Ward case to establishing significant legal groundwork in the Hunt victory, to winning the Holmes case, which resulted in the admission of Holmes and Hunter to the University of Georgia.

The narrative elucidates the close ties between local black lawyers and NAACP LDF attorneys and explores the details of their strategies to desegregate higher education in Georgia. The story of race relations and legal segregation in modern America led black attorneys to civil rights work,¹⁵ and their collective efforts helped bring about sweeping social change. This book reveals that most of the handful of Atlanta’s black lawyers in the 1950s had some involvement in civil rights litigation and illustrates how they worked together against racial injustice.

Though attorneys A. T. Walden and Donald Hollowell, both of whom were involved in the Hunt case, dedicated their practices largely to civil rights work in Atlanta and across the state, others within the small band of black attorneys also stepped up to take on civil rights cases. In her book Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, historian and legal scholar Tomiko Brown-Nagin notes that by uncovering the rich history of civil rights lawyering at the local level and the world of practitioners like Walden, we can expand our understanding of how local civil rights lawyers shaped the course of the long civil rights movement.¹⁶ This book provides insight into the challenges faced by local lawyers advancing the cause of civil rights in the Georgia State case, including their encounters with racial discrimination by the bar itself.

Notably, local counsel E. E. Moore, who engaged in the general practice of law, emerged as lead counsel in the Hunt case. Archival records reveal that nearly all the black lawyers in Atlanta at the time worked on the litigation in its formative stages. The narrative also covers the small group of black attorneys who joined in solidarity with Hollowell and Walden to defend the NAACP against legal attacks by the state around the time of the Hunt case.¹⁷ The state’s actions to ban the venerable civil rights organization demonstrated the vehemence with which Georgia officials sought to thwart any challenge to Georgia’s segregated way of life.

The book illuminates in particular the significant contributions of the trailblazing black female lawyer Constance Baker Motley, who worked closely with local lawyers on the Hunt case. Though Motley fit even more uneasily into the white-dominated legal system than her black male counterparts, she effectively represented Marshall and the LDF during the Hunt trial and provided an important role model and great source of inspiration to the black women plaintiffs.¹⁸

Brown-Nagin notes that narratives about the legendary Thurgood Marshall and the tactics and techniques of the NAACP LDF dominate much of the legal history of the civil rights movement.¹⁹ However, a new generation of scholars has broadened its focus from chronicling the achievements of nationally renowned figures to illuminating the stories of lesser-known activists such as Hunt, Dinsmore, and Welch.²⁰ For example, in historian Emilye Crosby’s edited volume Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, Crosby discusses the importance of historians focusing on the movement’s meaning for the local people who stepped up to directly challenge institutional white supremacy.²¹

Hunt, Dinsmore, and Welch, and the grassroots activists who supported them, were significant albeit unsung activists who helped advance the black freedom struggle through their challenge to institutional racism at Georgia State. Historian and legal scholar Kenneth Mack observes that grassroots protest and authenticity remain the strongest impulse in civil rights history, leading scholars to focus on the organizing traditions of local southern black communities that developed their own organic forms of protest.²² This book illuminates, in great detail, how local activists and lawyers developed organic forms of protest, banded together to resist oppression, and mounted a successful strategy to eliminate state-sanctioned obstructions to the admission of black students to a public college in Georgia in the late 1950s.

The narrative also illustrates the solidarity of largely autonomous black institutions and individuals, who did not depend on whites for their economic survival, in the fight that led to the first legal victory against segregated education in Georgia. The book brings to light the significance of black economic independence in mounting the challenge against Georgia State. Most of the applicants were employed by black businesses, and their jobs were therefore not in jeopardy due to their activism. Historian Maurice Hobson, in his book, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta, traces the history of black Atlantans building a strong foundation in business and education, which was crucial in undergirding the desegregation efforts of the Georgia State applicants.²³ Building on this narrative, Ground Crew specifically discusses how successful black businesses and black institutions of higher education in the black mecca provided encouragement and support to the applicants seeking to enter Georgia State. For example, the narrative examines the influence of community leaders such as prominent businessman Jesse Hill and Morehouse professor Samuel Williams, who were key advisers to the applicants and plaintiffs.

Chapter 1 introduces the six black students who bravely sought to enter the Georgia State College of Business Administration in March 1956. It discusses the institution’s founding in 1913 as an evening division of the Georgia Institute of Technology and its evolution into an independent unit of the University System of Georgia. The chapter describes the racially charged environment in Georgia and the layers of white supremacy that buttressed Jim Crow policies. It focuses on how inflammatory political rhetoric and racial hysteria incited violent acts to deter blacks from seeking racial justice and explores white officials’ support for black colleges as a strategy to thwart the desegregation movement.

The story that follows contextualizes the black struggle to end segregation at Georgia State within the framework of the NAACP’s groundbreaking legal victories against segregation in education in southern and border states, including its U.S. Supreme Court wins. It examines how these triumphs enraged whites and describes how rebellious Georgia officials engaged in state action that openly defied federal court actions. The chapter also highlights the first legal challenge to segregation in higher education in Georgia, mounted by Horace T. Ward in 1950. It emphasizes how many of the civil rights lawyers, community leaders, and grassroots activists who supported Ward were able to apply lessons they had learned from his struggle to enter the University of Georgia to help secure rights for the Georgia State applicants. Conversely, the chapter also describes how state officials recycled ploys they had created to block Ward’s admission to obstruct the Georgia State applicants.

In chapter 2, the narrative chronicles the renewed efforts of two of the original group of black students and three new black students seeking admission to Georgia State. The chapter focuses on the milieu of black Atlanta and describes its immersion in a culture of racial uplift and educational attainment. It discusses the evolution of Atlanta’s successful black businesses and its center of black higher education. It explores the relationships between the black applicants to Georgia State, grassroots activists, key leaders of Atlanta’s black businesses and educational institutions, and black attorneys. It underscores the advocacy of these civil rights activists and shows how they embraced and inspired the black applicants to persevere