The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

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  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 into 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 Cooperative 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 m
ost 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.’ ”

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  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.