The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  After a few minutes, Dr. Holmes bustled 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.”

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  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 Bootle 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 Bootle’s 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, Bootle later noted in a judicial understatement, “had probably never been asked of any applicant before.”…

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  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….

  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 Bootle’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, Bootle’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….

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  The University of Georgia was desegregated with unusual suddenness. Only a weekend separated Judge Bootle’s 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 Bootle 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 Buildi
ng, 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.