I first met Donald Hollowell in 1990 on the campus of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia, during an annual lecture honoring Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter (now Charlayne Hunter-Gault), whom Hollowell represented in the historic Holmes v. Danner case, which resulted in UGA’S desegregation.1 The university president’s office asked me, as president of the UGA Black Faculty and Staff Organization (BFSO), to escort Hollowell and his wife, Louise T. Hollowell—a bold civil rights advocate in her own right—during their campus visit. I was to meet the Hollowells at a reception attended by more than two hundred administrators, faculty, students, and community leaders.
As Donald Hollowell entered the reception, it was as though that moment was suspended in time. He had the kind of presence I have witnessed only a few times in my life, one that is difficult to describe. He was handsome, debonair, charismatic, and dignified. When a colleague introduced me to him, he bowed and shook my hand, somehow making me feel for that moment that I was his honored guest. In a deep baritone voice, meticulously enunciating every syllable, he said, “What a distinct honor to meet such a distinguished professor at the University of Georgia. I am deeply honored to be in your presence.”
As we chatted, he talked about what an accomplishment it was for me to serve as a professor at UGA. I was stunned by his sincere humility and deference and, frankly, embarrassed. As a highly privileged beneficiary of his work, I desperately wanted to shift the conversation and express my thanks to him for championing the cause of desegregating the university; however, I simply could not find the right moment to interrupt this great man who had such a noble presence, so I remained quiet.
Fortunately, in my role as president of the Black Faculty and Staff Organization and later as director of the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies, I had the opportunity to escort the Hollowells on numerous occasions during their visits to the university over the next decade and to honor Donald Hollowell formally for his achievements. In 2000, the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies presented Hollowell with the inaugural Foot Soldier for Equal Justice Award for his achievements in civil rights. In my remarks before a standing-room-only audience, I saluted him as a quintessential leader who had done so much for so many with such grace, dignity, and humility. Many of those in my generation had attained positions in education, business, politics, and other areas that would not have been possible without his civil rights work. Nonetheless, in dozens of meetings and in my personal interviews with him, he always presented himself with sincere humility.
Although Hollowell perennially deflected praise for himself, with no children of his own he spoke as a proud father when praising the accomplishments of those he had mentored.2 His reminiscences inspired me to begin researching the civil rights movement and the story of the desegregation of the University of Georgia, which eventually led to the creation of the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies, of which this book is a part.
I conducted my first interview with Hollowell on July 27, 1993, and he became my chief research consultant in my quest to chronicle the history of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. He guided and introduced me to civil rights leaders such as Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Constance Baker Motley, as well as to high-profile southern opposition leaders including former governor and senator Herman Talmadge and former governor Ernest Vandiver. His powerful and dynamic influence led me to research the untold story of Horace T. Ward and his pioneering role in the desegregation of the University of Georgia. Hollowell had represented Ward in an assault on UGA’S segregated law school, and Ward later became a partner in Hollowell’s law firm. The research resulted in my book, Horace T. Ward: Desegregation of the University of Georgia, Civil Rights Advocacy, and Jurisprudence, and a companion public television documentary that chronicled Ward’s story and the history of the desegregation of UGA.3
Hollowell trained dozens of lawyers, several of whom achieved national stature in politics and business as well as law. They include Vernon E. Jordan Jr., who moved to the forefront of the civil rights movement as president of the National Urban League; Horace T. Ward, who became Georgia’s first black federal district court judge; and Howard Moore, who represented black activist Angela Davis in her nationally observed California trial. Hollowell inspired his protégés to selfless, courageous acts as social reformers. For example, Jordan ended his clerkship with Hollowell to serve as Georgia’s field director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the most dangerous jobs in the civil rights movement. In this role Jordan frequently traveled to remote areas of Georgia to investigate complaints related to civil rights violations—as did his counterpart in Mississippi, Medgar Evers.
Jordan noted that it was Hollowell’s unfathomable courage that moved him to take on such work, attributing a great deal of his own courage to Hollowell’s powerful example: “For a young man who wanted to become a civil rights lawyer, or any type of lawyer for that matter, there was no better teacher and mentor than Don Hollowell. . . . Traveling the dangerous roads of Georgia practicing law was old hat to him. A calm leader makes for calm troops. His demeanor set the tone for the rest of us.”4
Hollowell’s historical visibility has, for the most part, been limited to his role in the Holmes v. Danner case and his representation of Martin Luther King Jr. in the King v. State case.5 Indeed, he etched his place in history in the Holmes case by leading the legal battle to desegregate higher education in Georgia and in the King case by securing King’s release after he was sent to Georgia’s maximum-security prison for a charge stemming from a minor traffic offense. Even in these cases, however, the full measure and impact of Hollowell’s achievements have not been illuminated. For example, it is seldom noted that his influence on Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter in the landmark Holmes case helped lay the groundwork for desegregating higher education in other Deep South states as well.6
In fact, Hollowell accomplished a great deal more than is generally recognized. In addition to the Holmes and King cases, he played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role as lawyer and chief negotiator in the historic Albany Movement to desegregate the public facilities of Albany, Georgia, and surrounding counties. Hollowell and Albany’s civil rights lawyer, C. B. King, represented King and Ralph Abernathy and secured the release of scores of demonstrators from Albany jails. Yet Hollowell is seldom acknowledged for representing leaders and grassroots activists in this movement. Similarly, little attention has been paid to his role in the precedent-setting federal court victory overturning the restraining order that barred King and other movement leaders from mass demonstrations in Albany. Many scholars and civil rights leaders credit the Albany Movement with laying the groundwork for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) effective use of mass demonstrations in other cities.7
Hollowell’s legal work as a defense attorney and his commitment to racial justice saved the lives of many black men whose fate might otherwise have been Georgia’s electric chair. This is not to say that he won every case; despite his legal acumen and at times heroic efforts, in some cases he failed to win justice for his clients or prevent their execution. Nonetheless, Hollowell’s legal work, especially in small Jim Crow towns, provided the foundation for future cases and inspired those he mentored, such as Howard Moore, Vernon Jordan, and Horace Ward, to fight against racial oppression.
Hollowell, like other civil rights attorneys before and during his era, was committed to the cause of social justice and performed his civil rights work out of a sense of duty. In one of my interviews with him, he recalled that his compensation in most of the civil rights cases he litigated was limited to legal fees paid by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). Created in 1940 as a separate, charitable, tax-exempt organization to do the legal work of the NAACP, the LDF often provided expert legal assistance and financial support to local civil rights lawyers.8 Hollowell recalled, “There was no compensation. We got our expenses paid, but I don’t have any recollection of there being any compensation. There were no monies that went into the corpus of our little firm. The rest of our practice helped us to keep our doors open.”9
During Hollowell’s service as chairman of the legal redress committee for the NAACP Georgia State Conference of Branches, he reported to the conference that often “there were not the funds available either in the State Conference Treasury or from the requesting individual with which to defray nominal expenses.”10 Even in his most celebrated case, which led to the desegregation of UGA, he recalled that he received only fees for legal expenses paid by the LDF. (Hamilton Holmes, who joined Charlayne Hunter as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, confirmed Hollowell’s memory. In my interview with Holmes, who went on to become a successful orthopedic surgeon, he jokingly urged me not to remind Hollowell that “he never got paid.”11)
Hollowell’s legal work covers a broad spectrum that not only helped justice prevail for individuals subjected to “quick” trials without due process but also helped Georgia repudiate its segregationist past to become more economically, politically, and socially progressive. For example, in a little-known 1960 case that was nevertheless of great strategic importance, Hollowell represented a black businessman who was relegated to eating in a corner reserved for blacks in a restaurant in the Atlanta airport. As a result of Hollowell’s triumph in the case, Dobbs Houses Inc. was barred from operating its segregated facility at Atlanta’s airport.12
The airport desegregation represents just one of the overlooked or forgotten battles that Hollowell won as a quiet soldier in the struggle for social justice. For despite his success, scholars have virtually ignored him in chronicling the history of the civil rights movement. An illustration of Hollowell’s obscurity is the omission of any mention of his work in the epic civil rights documentary series and companion book Eyes on the Prize.13
In 2002, concerned by the lack of recognition of Hollowell’s achievements even by the University of Georgia, I recommended Donald Hollowell to the UGA honorary degree committee for an honorary doctor of laws (JD) degree. While I was confident that the committee would include him among the finalists, honorary degrees also require the approval of the university president and the Board of Regents, and Hollowell had humiliated the former university president, the chancellor, the regents, and other university officials in the 1961 Holmes case. I wondered if the university would come full circle and bestow its highest honor on a man who had so resoundingly defeated UGA in a case that was ultimately affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.14
Therefore, it was a momentous day when the office of the UGA president called to inform me that Hollowell had been approved by the Board of Regents to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree. In 2002 Hollowell became the seventy-fifth recipient of the degree, which, after the earned doctorate, is the highest recognition that UGA can bestow. It was a well-deserved honor for a man who had fought vigorously for justice for all Georgia citizens. The eighty-seven-year-old buffalo soldier died of heart failure on December 27, 2004, but his legacy lives on through the scores of individuals he influenced and inspired.
Although this book includes a brief discussion of Hollowell’s early years, education, military service, and employment as a regional director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, its primary focus is his career as Georgia’s undisputed chief civil rights attorney during the critical years of the civil rights movement. Detailing both the challenges and his triumphs in his quest for social justice, it illuminates many of the formerly unacknowledged civil rights cases he championed. In developing this manuscript, I interviewed Hollowell’s colleagues and contemporaries and drew on a range of personal papers, first-person accounts, and other archival materials that helped to illustrate his struggle for equality in Georgia.
Hollowell was a pivotal behind-the-scenes figure whose distinctive story merits prominence in the history of civil rights in Georgia. As the lead legal strategist in the modern-day civil rights movement in Georgia, he led a handful of black lawyers who surmounted Jim Crow barriers to legally dismantle segregation. Hollowell and his colleagues also represented numerous black defendants in Georgia, including death-row inmates who were the victims of hasty, unjust trials carried out by a racially oppressive criminal justice system.
More than any other lawyer in Georgia, Hollowell devoted his practice to civil rights. Although he and his partners also practiced other forms of law to make ends meet, first and foremost, Hollowell was Georgia’s civil rights lawyer. Moreover, he also recruited a few newly minted lawyers to join him in the civil rights battle. Hollowell’s story thus sheds light not only on the contributions of his own work but also on the making of other black lawyers in Georgia whom he inspired with his legal acumen, his commitment to civil rights, and his courage under fire.
Hollowell faced racial discrimination personally and professionally as he struggled to achieve justice for his clients. He practiced in an era when blacks in the South were firmly relegated to second-class citizenship. The “public symbols and constant reminders” of the inferior position of blacks were codified in Jim Crow laws.15 The law itself thus obstructed as often as it aided justice, and Hollowell and other black lawyers frequently faced obstacles with the bar itself. Hollowell encountered judges who turned their backs as he presented his arguments, opposition counsel who used racial epithets in open court, and even a bailiff who insisted that he try his case from a courtroom balcony.
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP LDF tapped Hollowell as the principal lawyer in Georgia to represent the LDF in civil rights cases. Yet despite being Marshall’s man in Georgia and often working under the aegis of the LDF, Hollowell exercised great autonomy in writing the briefs, filing the pleadings, and serving as the chief counsel in the courtroom. His clients, fellow barristers, judges, and even opposition lawyers admired his brilliant legal skills, imposing presence, and mastery of the “king’s English,” which enhanced his effectiveness in the courtroom.
In addition to his legal groundwork on civil rights cases in collaboration with the LDF, Hollowell and other black activist lawyers in Georgia and throughout the South helped build support for civil rights in their local communities. Outside the courtroom, Hollowell also engendered support for civil rights that was integral to the success of local movements. He often spoke at civil rights mass meetings in Atlanta and across the state, helping inspire local activists to protest racial discrimination, and he served as the featured speaker at signature civil rights events. In 1963, for example, Atlanta NAACP leaders selected Hollowell to speak on civil rights issues in Georgia during the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.16 Summing up the role of black activist lawyers, Hollowell observed, “Black lawyers have been fulcrums on which the see-saw of the civil rights movement was balanced. They have been advocates and defendants—the swords and shields—and educators in lifting the dignity of human beings in the courts as well as out of the courts.”17
While Marshall and other well-known LDF lawyers such as Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, and Constance Baker Motley are rightly credited for their expert counsel in historic cases such as the desegregation of the University of Georgia, Hollowell and lesser-known local black activist lawyers often performed the legal groundwork that led to these landmark decisions. Historian and legal scholar Tomiko Brown-Nagin correctly observes that the narrative of the legendary Marshall and the strategies of the LDF “dominate much of the legal history of the civil rights movement.”18 However, a new generation of scholarship has expanded its focus from chronicling the achievements of nationally renowned figures to illuminating the stories of the movement’s lesser-known foot soldiers, revealing how much more remains to be learned about the remarkable social revolution that was the U.S. civil rights movement. The story of Donald L. Hollowell, the most influential lawyer in a state that was a battlefield of the movement, is one such story that needs to be told.
The narrative that follows demonstrates the power of combining the work of grassroots activists and local lawyers such as Hollowell with the efforts of better-known figures, and the success of this convergence in achieving legal victories across a wide spectrum of civil rights matters. In the historic Holmes v. Danner case, for example, Thurgood Marshall and LDF attorneys Constance Baker Motley and Jack Greenberg provided counsel, but it was Hollowell and Atlanta community activists who initiated the case and Hollowell who orchestrated the legal efforts. All too often, however, this latter element has been lost to history.
Without diminishing the accomplishments of celebrated figures, it is vital to chronicle the efforts of civil rights lawyers and grassroots protesters and their intersections with both the national NAACP and struggles for civil rights on the local level. This work examines the achievements of Georgia’s chief civil rights barrister, who influenced social change from the bottom up within the larger context of the NAACP struggle, often in alliance with direct-action tacticians—yet whose contributions have remained largely unacknowledged.19 Only by identifying the intersections between national organizations such as the NAACP and the work of local activists can we achieve a more accurate and complete understanding of the civil rights movement.20
This focus on Hollowell provides a grassroots view of the historical events that helped shape the struggle for civil rights in Georgia. The narrative captures his civil rights work in Atlanta as well as his work with grassroots leaders in other parts of Georgia. It covers well-known civil rights cases such as the desegregation of UGA while also chronicling the lesser-known, yet nonetheless significant, desegregation cases that provided the groundwork for that case. Recognizing the key figures and events in such unheralded cases enhances our appreciation of the struggles faced by ordinary citizens and by the movement in general.21 The recovery of previously overlooked historical events and figures highlights the pivotal roles played by the many individuals, groups, and communities whose collective efforts yielded social change.
Hollowell made enormous contributions at many levels to the campaign for racial equality. He was a central figure in the Atlanta branch of the NAACP and in other branches that initiated many of Georgia’s civil rights cases. Hollowell helped recruit and advise plaintiffs, and his all-encompassing support of his young clients often led them to regard him as a surrogate parent.22 Hollowell argued their cases in the courtroom and coordinated their legal strategies with the LDF in New York. With the onset of a new militancy in the 1960s initiated by groups such as the SCLC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality, Hollowell became the principal lawyer representing jailed activists across the state. When internal differences emerged between “old-guard” black leaders who promoted a legal approach to social change and the younger generation who advocated direct action, Hollowell maintained both his stature as chief lawyer and the reverence of proponents of direct action.
In the radical black-owned Atlanta Inquirer, cofounded by Atlanta Student Movement activists, Hollowell was dubbed the “dean of Atlanta’s Negro lawyers and freedom fighters.”23 At a time when members of SNCC and other young activists strongly criticized many leaders of the movement—including Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, and Austin Walden—as too conservative, SNCC leaders embraced Hollowell as a “radical,” describing him as a “militant civil rights attorney.”24 While Hollowell did not join demonstrators in jail-ins, his behind-the-scenes support and his speeches at civil rights mass meetings endeared him to the student activists.
Although Hollowell provided legal representation for the NAACP and the SCLC in the Albany Movement, when internal differences emerged in Albany between the NAACP and the SCLC leadership, on the one hand, and SNCC activists, on the other, Hollowell joined SNCC activists in advocating the leadership role of SNCC and grassroots activists. Undoubtedly, Hollowell’s involvement during college with the Student Negro Youth Congress, a radical activist organization, helped him to understand and identify with the student activists.
Much of Hollowell’s work in Albany and elsewhere does not fit easily into existing narratives of the “the movement,” which focus heavily on Martin Luther King Jr. and on legal and legislative civil rights victories.25 However, the narratives of activist black lawyers such as Hollowell and C. B. King provide a crucial understanding of how local lawyers worked in the trenches with student activists to empower and embolden them to fight for social justice. Moreover, these stories highlight how the efforts of such lawyers intersected with national civil rights campaigns to help achieve legal and legislative victories.
While activists gravitated to Hollowell due to his reputation as a civil rights lawyer who would take on “the man,” the fact that he made himself available to activists for little or no fee only strengthened their regard for him.26 The popular chant of student demonstrators—“King is our leader. Hollowell is our lawyer. We shall not be moved.”—aptly noted his stature among those engaged in direct action. He became intimately involved in encouraging and supporting direct-action strategies and frequently represented activists in negotiations with segregationist officials. At the same time, he often carried out the legal action that resulted in desegregation in areas such as public accommodations and transportation.27
Hollowell’s story illuminates the amazingly comprehensive struggle that ended legal segregation in Georgia’s public higher education and secondary schools, public accommodations, public transit, housing, health care, juries, and voting booths. Despite U.S. Supreme Court rulings and other higher court precedents, Hollowell and his colleagues often had to file cases repeatedly, district by district, to effect change as segregationist officials ignored court rulings outside their district or domain.
The book sheds light on Hollowell’s meticulous behind-the-scenes work to help bring about social change in Georgia, his collaboration with proponents of direct action, and the intersection of his work with that of Thurgood Marshall and the LDF’s campaign for equal justice. While the book reviews events that are historically significant in a traditional sense, it also looks beyond Hollowell’s courtroom victories and negotiated agreements, incorporating as well his insights, experiences, and community activism on the local level. The work also elucidates the racial environment in which Hollowell worked, his distinctiveness as a civil rights lawyer, the obstacles he faced, his personality and motivation, and his successful navigation of internal differences within the movement.
The book brings to light events in Georgia history in which public officials trampled the rights of its black citizens, showing how Hollowell ventured into remote areas of the state to represent African Americans. As Charlayne Hunter-Gault observes,
Don Hollowell, like Martin Luther King . . . transformed the South, and in the process transformed us. You know they made the dream possible. They helped us walk the walk and they gave us values, in a sense, that have remained with us all our lives. They affirmed us as human beings and they made that affirmation in such a way that every person alive had to acknowledge us as human beings. And so in a real sense, while they transformed the South, they left a living legacy, because all of us who were touched by him, Don Hollowell, in one way or another, have continued on a path wrapped in those values, and hopefully spreading those values wherever we are.28
In the spirit of Hunter-Gault’s powerful testimony, this book not only aims to tell Hollowell’s story as a foot soldier for equal justice but also seeks to learn from him in order to carry his legacy forward in the continuing struggle for social justice.