Saluting civil rights lawyers in 1965 for their vital contributions to the cause of social justice, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “You should be aware, as indeed I am, that the road to freedom is now a highway, because lawyers throughout the land, yesterday and today, have helped clear the obstructions, have helped eliminate road blocks, by their selfless, courageous espousal of difficult and unpopular causes.”1
Hollowell was the embodiment of a lawyer who espoused difficult and unpopular causes. His victory in the Nash case saved Willie Nash from a possible death sentence and secured his freedom. At the same time, he helped establish a legal foundation for civil rights lawyers to successfully represent black defendants charged with serious crimes against whites. Hollowell’s victory bolstered his rising stature as Georgia’s chief civil rights lawyer. The NAACP LDF began to call on him as their new lead counsel in Georgia, even as the state’s political leaders fought bitterly to maintain the status quo.
The heightened militancy of civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s presented new challenges and generated new legal cases for Hollowell. In addition to his criminal defense of clients such as Nash, he argued cases across a broad legal spectrum whose aim was to end segregation and defend the rights guaranteed to all citizens by the United States Constitution. This chapter recounts Hollowell’s efforts in two historic 1950s cases to end segregation in higher education in Georgia, and his successful defense of the NAACP in a 1956 lawsuit brought by the state, allegedly for the purpose of reviewing the NAACP membership records for tax purposes. Hollowell’s groundbreaking victory in a 1960 case that led to a federal injunction against segregated public facilities at the Atlanta airport is also discussed.
In the first legal case in Georgia to dismantle the centuries-old system of segregation in higher education, Hollowell battled Georgia’s popular segregationist governor, the president and the board of regents of the state’s flagship university, and the dean of the law school in a federal lawsuit against UGA. The lawsuit emanated from Horace T. Ward’s application for admission to the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens.
The University of Georgia was the United States’ first land grant college and Georgia’s most prestigious institution. Founded in 1785, the university had grown with the state and prided itself on academic excellence. During the late 1800s and 1900s, it became the path to economic and political success for generations of white Georgians. Admission to UGA was an initiation into a network of friends, alliances, and opportunities that often led to the pinnacle of power in Georgia. By 1950, fifteen UGA alumni had been elected governor, and nine had been elected to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate.2 Many Georgia alumni also held prominent positions in the General Assembly, in the judiciary, and on the University System of Georgia Board of Regents.
When Ward applied for admission, UGA alumnus Richard B. Russell Jr. was serving as one of Georgia’s U.S. senators and alumnus Herman Talmadge was governor. Longtime governor Eugene Talmadge, Herman’s father, was also a UGA graduate. Both Talmadges and Russell publicly proclaimed their support of white supremacy and defiantly opposed equal rights for African Americans. Herman Talmadge would become directly involved in blocking Ward’s admission to the UGA law school.3
Despite its enlightenment in many other areas, UGA sustained the centuries-old racial customs and mores, buttressed by state laws that prohibited blacks from admission to the university. Not surprisingly, faculty and professional positions were also off-limits for blacks. Although the university employed blacks in areas such as building and food services, they were not permitted to hold skilled positions such as carpenters or electricians. As Bennie Till man, longtime Athens resident and retired UGA food service worker, aptly put it, “Black employees were limited to working in the kitchen and in the yards.”4
Similarly, blacks were allowed to attend football games only if they sat in the “crow’s nest,” a separate section of the stadium reserved for blacks. Athens civil rights activist Alfred Killian recalled, “The crow’s nest was in the south stand at the very eastern end where the railroad tracks crossed. They would rope off one section and you had to sit in that one little section, else you didn’t sit anywhere.”5 Killian observed that he was an avid Georgia football fan and admired the athleticism of players such as Charlie Trippi and Johnny Griffith. At the same time, he remembered, “It was a bad feeling that I could not even apply to the university when I finished high school here.”6
As a whole, Athens, Georgia, was a thoroughly segregated city, not unlike most other cities in the Deep South. Segregation was the norm in most activities from cradle to grave, codified in Jim Crow laws and regulations. Chester Davenport Jr., who grew up in Athens in the 1940s and 1950s, remembered that there were two of everything in Athens, one for whites and one for blacks—segregated schools and recreational facilities, an inferior “colored” ward at the public hospital, and separate cemeteries for burial of blacks and whites.7 It was in the context of the deeply segregated environment of both the university and the city of Athens that Ward would seek admission to the UGA law school in 1950.
In 1946, Ward, who was valedictorian of his senior class at East Depot High School in LaGrange, Georgia, joined other talented and ambitious black men seeking to further their education and entered prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta, a favorite choice for aspiring black leaders. The tradition of the “Morehouse Man” inspired Ward and his classmates to assume leadership roles in their community in order to uplift their race. Professors such as legendary Morehouse president Benjamin E. Mays and Harvard-trained political scientist Robert Brisbane, one of Ward’s principal advisors, imparted to their students not only knowledge but also a sense of social responsibility in the context of the burgeoning civil rights movement.8
William Madison Boyd, who chaired the political science department at Atlanta University and served as president of the NAACP Georgia State Conference of Branches, also had a profound influence on Ward’s development. Boyd, an adviser to NAACP stalwart Thurgood Marshall, was actively seeking a student to challenge racial separation in Georgia’s system of higher education. Ward’s interest in attending law school and his courageous decision to apply to the UGA School of Law fit ideally into the NAACP’S plan to legally attack segregation in Georgia schools.
By the time Ward submitted his application in September 1950, the NAACP had successfully mounted challenges to segregation in higher education in Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. In 1936, in the first major case in the NAACP’S campaign for educational equality, Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall prevailed in a lawsuit in Baltimore City Court that won the admission of Donald Murray to the University of Maryland law school. Presiding judge Eugene O’Dunne ruled that since the state did not have a separate law school for blacks, it had to admit Murray to the only state law school in Maryland.9 It was a sweet victory for Marshall, who had been rejected for admission on racial grounds by the Maryland law school four years earlier.
In 1938, Houston and Sidney Redmond, a Missouri lawyer, won a victory on behalf of Lloyd Gaines, who sought to enter the all-white University of Missouri. Refusing Gaines admission, university officials offered him financial assistance to attend a school outside Missouri, a common practice in several states during that period to preserve white institutions within their borders. Gaines declined the out-of-state tuition grant and with the help of the NAACP sued the University of Missouri for admission.
When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the court declared that states could not free themselves of the obligation to provide equal education by sending black students out of state.10 The ruling struck down the out-of-state grant as an acceptable means for states to fulfill their obligation to black residents seeking higher education. However, the victory was dampened when Gaines vanished. Despite NAACP officials’ attempts to find Gaines, his disappearance has remained a mystery. LDF counsel Constance Baker Motley observed that the NAACP investigated Gaines’s disappearance and sought to locate him for several years, but to no avail.11
On June 5, 1950, a few months before Ward submitted his application, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the NAACP two precedent-setting victories in higher education. In the case of Sweatt v. Painter, the court unanimously held that the substandard black law school that Texas had hastily set up in the basement of a building for black applicant Heman Sweatt was in no way equal to the law school at the University of Texas. In addition to finding the so-called black law school unequal, the court for the first time “ordered the admission of a black student to an all-white educational institution.”12
Marshall and the LDF had also won the admission of graduate student George McLaurin to the University of Oklahoma in the lower courts. However, Oklahoma officials restricted him to an anteroom outside the main classroom and forced him to use other facilities on a segregated basis.13 On the same day as the Sweatt decision, in the McLaurin v. Oklahoma case, the court ruled that once Oklahoma officials admitted McLaurin to its graduate school, they could not segregate him within the school. In response to the court’s decisions, an ecstatic Thurgood Marshall observed that segregation no longer had the stamp of legality. A few weeks later Marshall convened lawyers and NAACP officials in New York to plan for the implementation of the legal decisions and mount an “all-out attack on segregation.”14
Ward had been introduced to the cases in Texas and Oklahoma in a constitutional law class taught by Boyd, his adviser and Atlanta University professor. The cases gave Ward great encouragement, and in light of the court decisions in Texas and Oklahoma he thought that the University of Georgia might admit him without court action.15 However, despite the legal precedents and Ward’s outstanding academic record, with a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse in 1949 and a master’s degree from Atlanta University in 1950, UGA rejected his application in 1950. J. Alton Hosch, dean of UGA’S law school, contended that Ward did not seem qualified to pursue the study of law, nor did he show the type of mind to successfully practice law.16 Moreover, not only were Ward’s personal qualifications judged inadequate but so too was the quality of his degrees. Although applicants to the UGA School of Law at the time were required to have completed only two years of college work, and Ward had earned two degrees with honors, the school flatly rejected his application because his degrees were granted by African American institutions.17
In addition to stating that Ward was not qualified, the regents and university officials obstructed his application with a barrage of procedural requirements. The protracted admissions process included everything from offering Ward a tuition waiver to attend an out-of-state school to adopting a new procedure that required a special committee to interview, in theory, “all” applicants. The offer to pay Ward a stipend to keep the university all white reflected the arrogance and hardened resistance of university officials, since the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled this practice unconstitutional as far back as 1938 in Gaines v. Canada.18
Even more deviously, on July 19, 1952, the regents adopted a recommendation from the law school faculty requiring prospective students to pass entrance examinations and submit “certificates of good moral character” from law school alumni as an admissions requirement.19 As early as February 1952, the LDF concluded in a legal department report that the proposed resolution was “undoubtedly an attempt to further delay action on Ward’s application and to perfect a means for eliminating Ward as a qualified applicant.”20 On June 23, 1952, one month before the regents adopted the new entrance requirements, Ward, frustrated with an almost two-year admissions process and convinced that the university would not voluntarily admit him, decided to sue in the United States District Court, Northern District of Georgia. The suit fit within the framework of Marshall’s plan to directly attack segregation. Emboldened by the Sweatt, McLaurin, and Sipuel decisions, the case was filed by A. T. Walden, Thurgood Marshall, and Robert Carter of the NAACP. Walden was Ward’s attorney, and he and Boyd had been successful in convincing the NAACP to assist with the case. Ward’s suit contended that regents and university officials had rejected his application because of his race, while at the same time the university had admitted white applicants with equal or lesser qualifications.
Reflecting on these events many years later, Ward recalled:
By June of 1951, it became clear that I would not get admitted. I had refused out-of-state aid, and the registrar had told me that my application had been considered and was hereby denied, so I went to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Boyd brought Attorney Walden into the case. Thereafter I had two advisors, Boyd and Walden—and Walden consulted with me and I consulted with him, really, in most of the letters I wrote thereafter. In the spring of 1952 after the rules had been changed, we decided, at least I decided on the advice of counsel, that we would no longer seek to satisfy the new requirements but would file a lawsuit.21
Shortly after the NAACP attorneys filed the suit, Boyd, the passionate Georgia NAACP leader who had initially championed Ward’s case and raised the funds for the litigation, retained Hollowell to join the case. Boyd created a “Ward Fund of the NAACP“ for the purpose of raising funds to cover legal expenses and travel from New York for Thurgood Marshall. The forward-thinking Boyd even raised funds for “covering Ward’s expenses at the University of Georgia once the law school case [was] won.”22 In a January 1953 fundraising letter to potential donors, Boyd wrote:
I beg you to join my list of contributors to the Horace Ward Fund. This contribution is apart from any other donation made to the NAACP, and will be used exclusively for the University of Georgia Law School Case. By God’s grace and with your help we shall vigorously fight this case through to ultimate victory.23
Although the redoubtable A. T. Walden had been Ward’s chief local lawyer, Boyd, who was impressed by Hollowell’s energy and vigor in pursuit of civil rights, insisted that Hollowell become the new chief counsel. Given that Walden had encouraged Hollowell to move to Atlanta and helped him establish his practice, Hollowell was understandably reluctant to offend his friend, colleague, and mentor. Therefore, he privately and wisely urged Boyd to allow Walden to remain on the case.
Walden, Thurgood Marshall, and other LDF lawyers made a formidable team under Hollowell’s leadership. Such a strong team effort was necessary, for they faced serious opposition from a group of state political leaders ensnared in racial intolerance and xenophobia. Led by Governor Herman Talmadge, the state vowed to defend its segregated system, and state officials employed a variety of tactics to stall Ward’s application, including assembling a package of laws that would close schools if Ward or other black students were admitted. Talmadge deputized his personal attorney, B. D. Murphy, and issued a pointed order: “Keep that damned nigger out of the University of Georgia while I’m governor”24 In a 1995 interview, former governor Talmadge contended that any other action would have been politically untenable: “You see, we had had several hundred years of segregation. And it was mores and customs, not only with the people, but it was written in the constitution and laws. Any political figure that dared to defy that wouldn’t have carried a county in the state! Any southern leader that would have had different views from mine would have been run out of office—the same day!”25
By the summer of 1953, Hollowell, Walden, and the LDF lawyers from New York had overcome most of the legal maneuvers, stonewalling, and procedural delays, and the case was scheduled for trial on October 9, 1953. But then one of the amazing ironies of the civil rights movement occurred. Exactly thirty days before Ward’s case was scheduled to go to court, he was drafted into the army. For the state this timing could not have been more providential, though many civil rights leaders and others doubted that the timing of Ward’s induction was truly coincidental. Hollowell himself questioned the convenient timing, observing: “You can be sure we wondered if it was a purely coincidental thing; our better judgment told us it was not. After all, draft boards had lots of power. . . . I think we don’t have to be terribly sophisticated to come to the conclusion that it just may not have been purely coincidental.”26
In later years, Governor Talmadge’s evasion of questions about his role in the drafting of Ward fueled speculation that state officials were involved. Syndicated columnist Bill Shipp observed: “That question has been put pointedly to Senator Talmadge, and he has not denied that he had some hand in it and was not disappointed that this huge coincidence occurred—that this man was suddenly snatched into the armed services just as he was about to gain admission into the University of Georgia.”27
Apprehensive that the state would dismiss the case after Ward’s call to duty, Marshall made a quick trip to Atlanta to file a motion with federal judge Frank A. Hooper to continue the case after Ward completed military service. With Hollowell and Walden, Marshall convinced the judge to reassign the case for trial upon request by Ward.28
Ward’s personal quest for equal rights was postponed while he went to fight for the rights of Koreans during his two-year tour of duty. By the time Ward was honorably discharged in the summer of 1955, Hollowell had won the Nash case, and although he had practiced law for only three years, he had already solidified his position as Georgia’s chief civil rights attorney. Now that Ward had returned, Hollowell was ready to revive the Ward case against the University of Georgia School of Law and the Georgia Board of Regents.
With Hollowell as chief counsel and with assistance from Walden and the LDF lawyers, Ward renewed his lawsuit on August 25, 1955. After a three-year attempt to enter UGA’S law school and two years of honorable military service, Ward, who was fervent in his desire to earn a law degree and uncertain about the timing or outcome of his lawsuit, also submitted an application to Northwestern University’s law school. Although UGA officials had judged him an “unqualified” applicant who did not “possess the mind to study law,” he was readily admitted to prestigious Northwestern University and entered its law school in September 1956.
While Ward pursued his legal studies at Northwestern, his case dragged on and on. Hollowell encountered new and often devious stalling tactics by the state that delayed the case until December 1956. After nine different hearings since Ward had returned from the army, the case was finally heard by Judge Frank A. Hooper on December 17–20, 1956, and January 3, 1957.29 Thurgood Marshall, busy with a panoply of civil rights cases that had arisen in response to the 1954 Brown decision, assigned Constance Baker Motley to represent the LDF at the trial. Motley, a Columbia University law school graduate, had clerked for Marshall and had worked on the historic Sweatt v. Painter case that resulted in a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision to admit Heman Sweatt as the first black student at the University of Texas at Austin.30
During the hearing, Hollowell, Walden, and Motley contended that Ward had been rejected by the UGA School of Law solely on the basis of race, while university officials had admitted substantially less qualified white students. The attorneys showed how officials from the state, the university, and the Board of Regents had conspired to deprive Ward of access to a legal education. A key piece of evidence presented by Hollowell’s team was the Appropriations Bill of 1951, which was passed shortly after Ward submitted his application. The bill required the state to withhold funds in the event a black student entered an all-white college.31
Hollowell also elicited testimony from state officials that showed their intent to uphold segregation. For example, in a riveting exchange under examination by Hollowell, Harmon W. Caldwell, former dean of the UGA School of Law and chancellor of the university system, revealed how the system made scholarships available to send black students out of state for educational opportunities not available in the state’s historically black institutions. As a confident spokesman for the “separate but equal” doctrine, he asserted that because Ward had been offered aid to attend an out-of-state school in lieu of admission to the law school, Ward had not been deprived of the opportunity to secure a legal education. Defending the racially segregated system, Caldwell declared, “We do wish in our institution, and so far as possible, to preserve segregation of the races.”32
Under further examination by Hollowell, Caldwell stated that although the regents encouraged blacks to go out of state (to maintain the all-white university), they did not actually send them out of state. Hollowell later contended that Caldwell was an accommodationist to the system of segregation and would have faced repercussions if he had not supported that system. Nonetheless, he questioned Caldwell’s veracity and argued that he should adhere to a higher standard given that he was a lawyer, former dean of a law school, and chancellor of the university system. “There were some that I put greater responsibility upon than others. And yet I also recognized that if they had done other than what they did it could have been detrimental. At the same time, I say they had a responsibility to be truthful, and I don’t think that some of them were really truthful”33
Constance Baker Motley put it more bluntly, noting:
The system is based on people getting on the stand and telling the truth. But people who talk about their respect for tradition and integrity and the Constitution get involved in one lie after another. They’re willing to break down the system to keep a Negro out. . . . They do the same kind of thing in voting cases. People are denied the right to vote not because they’re Negroes but because they didn’t dot an “i” or interpret the Constitution correctly. This is one of the most serious by-products of segregation. The people get a disregard for the law. They see supposedly important people get up day after day on the stand and lie.34
In another line of questioning during the trial, Hollowell challenged the unprecedented admissions requirements that the university adopted shortly after Ward’s application: the personal interview, the series of entrance examinations, and certificates of “good moral character” from UGA alumni. Although the personal interview requirement was adopted after his application to the law school, Ward in fact had agreed to an interview set up by university president O. C. Aderhold and conducted by law school dean J. Alton Hosch, noted historian E. M. Coulter, and law professor Robert Mc-Whorter. Hosch testified that Ward’s statements during the interview were “evasive, inconsistent, and didn’t show the type of mind that [he] thought, and the committee thought an applicant should have to successfully pursue the study of law.”35 He concluded that Ward was not the type of man the committee should recommend to the president of the university for admission.36 Caldwell conceded that the regents adopted the new admissions requirement shortly after Ward refused the out-of-state aid offer and insisted that the regents consider his application, but flatly denied that the resolution was designed to block Ward’s admission.
Hollowell also cross-examined Regent Charles Bloch, a constitutional lawyer and vehement segregationist, on his testimony extolling the virtues of the new policies adopted while Ward’s application was pending. Bloch claimed that the new admissions policies were strictly for the purpose of “getting better students at the University of Georgia, and hoping that would affect all other law schools in the state, and for what [he] thought was for the betterment of the administration of justice in Georgia.”37 He testified that he knew Ward’s application was pending but insisted that it was not a factor in the new law school admissions policies. Hollowell then pointedly asked Bloch, “And the fact that that was passed, and was to have an immediate effect, did not in any way to you seem inequitable to a man whose application had been pending for fifteen months?” Despite the obviously adverse impact of the new policies on Ward’s application, Bloch responded that there was nothing inequitable about the regents’ action.38
After almost a week of motions and countermotions from both sets of attorneys, questioning the motives and truthfulness of university officials as well as Ward himself, Ward dropped a bombshell in the courtroom when he revealed that he was living in Chicago and attending Northwestern University School of Law. The revelation all but demolished the defendants’ charges that Ward was merely a stooge of the NAACP who was not genuinely interested in obtaining a legal education but had filed his case just to challenge segregation at the University of Georgia. Moreover, the fact that he had been accepted to Northwestern attested to his qualifications for admission to a first-tier law school. However, the dramatic revelation of his admission to Northwestern, which should have bolstered Ward’s case, was turned against him by the court.
Despite closing arguments by Hollowell and Motley urging the court to find that Ward had been refused admission based on his race, Judge Hooper ruled that Ward’s admission to Northwestern University was grounds for dismissal of his case. While Hollowell disagreed with the ruling, he conceded that the court should have been informed in advance that Ward had been admitted to Northwestern. He acknowledged that “proper discretion” had not been used in failing to reveal Ward’s enrollment in Northwestern.39 Motley had previously argued the landmark Lucy v. Adams case before the Supreme Court on behalf of plaintiff Autherine Lucy; the court in this case declared that although the University of Alabama did not have a written policy prohibiting the admission of blacks, the university enforced a tacit policy of denying black applicants admission based solely on race. The court restrained the University of Alabama from refusing black applicants based solely on race.40
Motley asked the court for an injunction patterned after the Lucy injunction to prevent the university from blocking Ward’s admission. Despite objections by Hollowell and his team, however, the judge ruled that Ward’s enrollment at Northwestern University compromised his application to UGA as a first-year law student, and he dismissed the case without adjudicating the merits of Ward’s claim of racial discrimination. Ward recalled the absurdity of the ruling: “Judge Hooper’s ruling was basically on technical grounds. He never ruled whether I was qualified or not. He just ruled that I had not complied with the procedures and I had not fully satisfied the administrative appeals procedures. And, secondly, I had already gone to another law school. I think that case probably would have been a good case for appeal that might be overturned. I’m pretty sure it would have been.”41
Indeed, Hollowell regarded the ruling as an excellent case for an appeal. However, he concluded that after seeking to enter the law school for seven years, Ward, already in his late twenties, should move on. Hollowell emphasized that much of the money William Madison Boyd had raised had been spent, and sadly, the momentum of the case had received a serious blow when Boyd had died of leukemia earlier in the year at the age of only thirty-nine. Hollowell concluded: “We thought it better if he [Ward] go on. Since they had made a change in the administrative procedure for appeals, we were convinced that they would keep dancing us around some more. We didn’t know what else they had up their sleeve or what other legal tricks they would employ. We thought it best to let Ward go on. He had certainly paid his dues, and more.”42
Despite the court’s decision, Hollowell’s work on the Ward case had set the stage for what was to come. Hollowell, who had already displayed criminal defense skills in superior court, had now demonstrated his legal acumen as the chief lawyer in a major civil rights case in federal court. Vernon E. Jordan Jr., who would later work with Hollowell on the historic Holmes and Hunter case that desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961, summed up the significance of Ward’s case: “The importance of the Ward case was that it challenged the doctrine of separate but equal; it was a legal challenge, and it was a stepping-stone to what happened in the Hamilton Holmes-Charlayne Hunter case.”43
Although Judge Hooper dismissed the Ward case on technical grounds, it was clear that time was running out for Georgia’s segregated school system. Accordingly, Georgia officials, desperate to maintain the state’s segregated way of life, began efforts to curtail NAACP lawsuits against racial injustice, a move replicated in several southern states.44 In 1956 the state filed a suit against the Atlanta branch of the NAACP to force the organization to reveal its membership records to the state revenue commissioner, supposedly for tax purposes. NAACP leaders had refused to release the records, contending that state officials sought the records for the purpose of intimidating and harassing NAACP members. Hollowell observed that the true reason behind the state’s demand for the NAACP’S records was to rouse white hostility against the organization and its cause. In a December 8, 1956, report on the case to the NAACP Georgia Conference of Branches, he noted:
On the debit side has been the step-up of activities on the part of certain state officials, and others who think like them, to inflame the minds of white people to an extent calculated to provoke violence against the NAACP, specifically, and our people generally. Yes, even now as I read this report, the very life of our organization in this state is being attacked. For you know and I know that there is more to the pending court case than what some people in high places would have us believe.45
The attack on the venerable civil rights organization, which was highly respected not only in the black community but also among many whites, galvanized virtually all of Atlanta’s black attorneys to join Hollowell and Walden to defend the NAACP. While few other black lawyers dedicated their practices to civil rights, their solidarity in this case signaled that they were imbued with the spirit of activism and willing to join in the battle. In addition to Hollowell and Walden, attorneys E. E. Moore Jr., S. S. Robinson, Romae L. Turner, and NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter Jr. joined in the case. Moore, Robinson, and Turner practiced general law in Atlanta and occasionally joined in civil rights cases.46 Turner later became the first black person to preside over a state court in Georgia. Robert L. Carter, a primary associate of Thurgood Marshall, later served as NAACP general counsel and in 1972 was appointed by President Richard Nixon to the United States District Court of New York.
In the NAACP case, the state demanded that the NAACP and J. H. Calhoun, president of the Atlanta branch of the association, comply with the request from the Revenue Commissioner of Georgia to turn over its membership records for inspection related to income taxes. Judge Durwood T. Pye, probably the most diehard segregationist with the Fulton County Superior Court, presided over the trial. Immediately, Hollowell and Walden filed a motion requesting that Pye recuse himself from the case due to racial bias. Pye responded angrily that he considered it a serious affront to be accused of bias against “nigras.” Nevertheless, Pye’s further response showed his racial bias. “The court,” he noted, referring to himself in the third person, “could not look at itself in the mirror when it shaves in the morning, if it were to consider itself prejudiced.” However, he went on, “The court also does not believe in the mongrelization of the races.”47
In retaliation for their motion, Pye issued a “show cause” order against Hollowell and Walden, requiring them to prove why they should not be held in contempt for impugning his judicial rectitude.48 Although Pye did not hold Hollowell and Walden in contempt, he refused to recuse himself from the case. To no one’s surprise, Pye ruled against the NAACP and held Calhoun and the NAACP in contempt for refusing to divulge its membership records as required by court order.49 On December 14, 1956, Pye fined the NAACP $25,000 for noncompliance with the court order to turn over its records.50
The NAACP was rightly concerned about possible harassment of its members if the membership records were handed over, as it was commonplace during this period for blacks to find themselves in dire straits for engaging in civil rights advocacy. For example, in 1959, civil rights advocate and Martin Luther King Jr. associate Joseph E. Lowery found himself in trouble for his activism. In a bizarre case, Lowery, three other ministers, and the New York Times were sued for libel by Montgomery, Alabama, officials because their names had appeared in a New York Times ad to raise money for a King defense fund. L. B. Sullivan, a City of Montgomery elected official, alleged that he had been libeled by statements in the ad. A jury in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County awarded Sullivan a $500,000 judgment, and the Supreme Court of Alabama affirmed the lower court decision. Although Lowery and his codefendants ultimately prevailed in the case, officials seized Lowery’s property, and the case dragged on for years before the U.S. Supreme Court settled it in 1964.51 In a major victory confirming freedom of the press, the court ruled that “judgments for libel [could not] constitutionally be sustained.”52
In the 1956 NAACP case, disclosing the membership records could have placed many blacks in jeopardy of harassment, losing their jobs, or even facing trumped-up lawsuits. Determined to protect the records from unscrupulous officials and to avoid the $25,000 fine, Hollowell and his comrades filed a series of motions to the court. As the case dragged on, Pye, frustrated with the prolonged proceedings, issued a subsequent contempt order on October 2, 1959, ordering payment of the fine. Hollowell filed a subsequent motion on February 11, 1960, objecting to the fine on the grounds that it was excessive, cruel, and unusual, therefore violating Article VIII of the United States Constitution as well as the Fourteenth Amendment. Hollowell further contended in the motion that the NAACP operated on a limited budget and payment of such a fine would be “onerous, harsh, and oppressive” and would seriously undermine the organization’s ability to pursue its objectives—which, of course, was precisely the purpose of the state’s lawsuit.53
Hollowell consulted regularly with Carter on legal strategy, and in a letter dated April 21, 1960, Carter validated Hollowell’s contention about the NAACP’S limited budget. Noting that funds were limited, Carter stated bluntly, “We are not going to be able to put up $25,000.”54 Undoubtedly, the local Atlanta branch could hardly afford to pay the fine either. Unmoved by Hollowell’s contention that the fine was unjust and exorbitant, Pye issued yet another order on March 3, 1960, again insisting on payment of the fine. Although the volleys continued for several months, the NAACP never paid the fine, nor did it surrender its membership records. Hollowell and the NAACP persevered and ultimately appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Georgia, which ruled in their favor.55 Hollowell, who had succeeded in Georgia’s lower courts, was now triumphant in Georgia’s highest court as the government’s campaign of harassment failed to yield a real victory.
The NAACP case was a powerful example of what was beginning to happen throughout the South, as assaults on blacks and civil rights organizations galvanized blacks to unite to defend their rights and demand equal justice under the law. Black lawyers in particular joined the battle, working hand in hand with the NAACP in the fight for racial justice. In addition to Hollowell and Walden in Georgia, passionate community activists such as Fred Gray in Alabama, Wiley Branton in Arkansas, Harold Boulware in South Carolina, Amos T. Hall in Oklahoma, Oliver Hill in Virginia, and Z. Alexander Looby in Tennessee continued to carry out Charles Hamilton Houston’s plan to dislodge the Jim Crow system.56
Segregationists fortified their resistance to change by passing obstructionist laws and reviving symbols of hatred and oppression. On February 13, 1956, Georgia’s General Assembly approved making the battle flag of the Confederacy a part of the state flag. Speaking on behalf of the flag bill, Denmark Groover, Governor Marvin Griffin’s racially polarizing floor leader, said, “The move should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that Georgia will not forget the teachings of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. . . . This will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for, and will fight for”57
Despite the hardened resistance, one month later, with help from Atlanta NAACP branch president John Calhoun and attorney E. E. Moore, five ambitious students from Atlanta—Barbara Hunt, Iris Welch, Russell Roberts, Marian McDaniel, and Myra Holland—started down the same rocky road traveled by Horace Ward when they applied to Atlanta’s all-white Georgia State College of Business (GSCB) in Atlanta. Reminiscent of the officials who blocked Ward’s entrance to UGA, GSCB and regents officials resorted to a variety of recognizable obstructionist tactics. The same requirements for personal character references from white alumni that had been crafted to block Ward were used as a primary obstacle to prevent the students from gaining admission to GSCB. With the help of Atlanta NAACP leader Jesse Hill, the students made ceaseless attempts to secure certificates of moral character from alumni, but despite their efforts, GSCB alumni flatly refused to provide certificates, and GSCB officials rejected their applications.
Hollowell’s compelling legal groundwork proving the discriminatory nature of admissions requirements in the Ward case had provided him with valuable legal experience even though the case was ultimately unsuccessful. Once again he joined the legal team of A. T. Walden and Constance Baker Motley to renew the legal assault on Georgia’s Jim Crow system of higher education. Attorney E. E. Moore, who initially assisted the students in their efforts to gain admission, also served as counsel in the case.
After two years of recycled stalling tactics that dated back to the Ward complaint, Judge Boyd Sloan presided over the case on December 8–12, 1958, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Again state officials resorted to underhanded tactics. In addition to their argument that the black applicants had not submitted character certificates from white alumni, state officials also sought to besmirch the applicants’ moral character. Two of the applicants, Holland and Hunt, had each conceived a child out of wedlock; therefore, according to GSCB and regents officials, the women lacked the moral rectitude for admission.
Civil rights opponents during this period lashed out in many ways against students seeking to enter white institutions of higher education. In the Ward case, officials had asserted that Ward lacked both the personal qualifications to enter the law school and the “mind” to study law and that he was a mere stooge for the NAACP. Officials often alleged that applicants were Communist-inspired, “outside agitators” intent on destroying the southern way of life, or that they were “sexual fiends.”58 In the GSCB case, in addition to claiming that the black women were pawns of the NAACP, officials also characterized them as sexually deviant because their children were born out of wedlock.
While black women seeking to break the color line in white institutions were described as prostitutes or sexual fiends, black men seeking entrance to white institutions were also labeled as sexually immoral.59 For example, in the Holmes v. Danner case, admissions officials accused Hamilton Holmes of frequenting a “house of ill repute.” According to a confidential informant who spied on Holmes for university officials, “reportedly this house [had] white girls as well as colored for the proper price.”60 Since the courts had banned the use of race as a reason to reject black applicants, officials searched for anything in an applicant’s background that could be used to discredit a black student seeking admission to a white institution.
Despite the state’s efforts to discredit the plaintiffs on moral grounds, Moore, Hollowell, Walden, and Motley flatly insisted that state officials denied admission to the applicants because of their race while at the same time, with public funds, afforded whites an opportunity to attend the institution. They also argued that admissions policies requiring black students to obtain alumni certificates were unreasonable because, due to the social separation of blacks and whites and the fact that no black student had previously attended the school, the plaintiffs were not acquainted with any of the all-white alumni.61
Surprisingly, unlike Judge Hooper in the Ward case, Sloan did not evade one of the central issues raised by Hollowell in that case: that Ward had been rejected solely due to his race. In an interview, Constance Baker Motley suggested that an important reason for this difference was Sloan’s political orientation: “Nobody seemed to know his [Sloan’s] background. Nobody seemed to know that he was, I guess, what they call a liberal. And he ruled with us—and he enjoined enforcement of the policy. He enjoined the requirement for required alumni certificates, and all the other silly things that they brought forward, so their application could then be considered on its merits.”62
Judge Sloan noted, “The effect of the alumni certificate requirement upon Negroes has been, is, and will be to prevent Negroes from meeting this admission requirement,” and ruled that the alumni certification requirement was unconstitutional.63 This unexpected and welcome victory fell short, however, as Sloan failed to order GSCB to admit any of the applicants, leaving college officials to determine whether the applicants met all valid admissions requirements. Even more unsettling, he also ruled that two of them were of questionable moral character and were therefore not qualified for admission. Consequently, the plaintiffs left the case “with a lingering sense of shame and indignity because of the defense’s cruel attack on their moral character.”64 Equally disappointing, they were unable to enter GSCB to fulfill their dreams of attaining a college degree from the state university in their home city. Predictably, GSCB found that none of the applicants met all valid requirements, and none of them was ever admitted to the college.
Hollowell had now played a pivotal role in two federal lawsuits to desegregate higher education in Georgia. While the GSCB case brought a partial victory, Hollowell would resume the battle to admit black students to the all-white University System of Georgia a few years later. In light of the state’s history of putting plaintiffs’ private lives under a microscope, Hollowell would collaborate with Atlanta’s black civil rights leaders in future cases to select plaintiffs who could withstand the scrutiny of an FBI-style investigation. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other battles to fight, for example, for access to public facilities. Although blacks could patronize some stores, restaurants, and theaters, it was always with a degrading twist: backdoor entrances, separate seating areas, separate restrooms and water fountains, and generally disrespectful, second-class service. Hollowell himself was no stranger to such indignities. He recalled a typical example during an outing with his wife in Atlanta:
We went to the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. I noticed we went past the place where the tickets were sold there in front, and we wound up on the backside where there must have been 150 steps literally; and I told her then that, but for you, I wouldn’t even go in and I said I would never come back here.65
In a dangerous incident in 1954, Hollowell, his wife, and three companions were traveling through southwestern Georgia on a return trip to Atlanta after attending a Morris Brown and Florida A&M college football game in Tallahassee. Hollowell stopped his car at a Standard Oil station in the small town of Butler to buy gas and use the restroom. As Hollowell started toward the “whites only” restroom, the owner ordered him to stop and refused to let him use the facilities. In the meantime, Hollowell’s companions had entered the station to purchase soft drinks. “Hollowell curtly replied” to the owner that “he did not spend his money where he could not use the bathroom” and told his companions to put the soft drinks they planned to purchase on the counter and return to the car.
As the station owner pulled a .38 caliber pistol from beneath the counter, Hollowell stormed outside and removed the nozzle from the gas tank before the attendant could finish filling the tank. While Louise and their guests, understandably, began to display anxiety and fear, Hollowell strode back into the station and asked how much he owed. The nervous owner, still wielding the pistol, gave him a figure, and Hollowell paid for the gas, left the store, and quickly drove away. Louise, who had grown up in South Georgia and knew well the dangers of blacks challenging the social order, asked Hollowell if he had been afraid when he reentered the store to pay the gun-wielding owner. Hollowell responded “no,” but added that he “walked real fast” to return to the car after paying for the gas.66
Louise passionately supported Hollowell’s advocacy but feared the reprisals that could befall him for challenging the system. She recalled that she was both frightened and thrilled by Hollowell’s refusal to be intimidated. She concluded that Hollowell’s lack of fear was due, in part, to his upbringing outside the South. Louise remembered: “I asked him one day, ‘Don, are you afraid?’ He said, ‘No, I’m not afraid.’ I told him, ‘Well, you don’t know any better. If you had been born in this section of the country, if you were born where I was born, or in Atlanta, or any of these southern states, particularly Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia, then you would be afraid.’”67
Such experiences were difficult for the eight-year army veteran to reconcile, in light of his willingness to give his life for a country that treated him as less than a full citizen. Hollowell refused to patronize any segregated facility and began to take on cases involving equal access to public accommodations. Many of these legal battles would provide a tactical advantage in the fight for equality, as in the 1960 case that challenged segregated service at Atlanta’s airport restaurant. Insulted by the second-class treatment of blacks at Atlanta’s airport, H. D. Coke, a black insurance executive with the Protective Industrial Insurance Company of Birmingham, Alabama, decided to strike back. While traveling from Birmingham to Columbus, Ohio, Coke had to change planes in Atlanta; because his connecting flight was late, Delta Air Lines issued meal tickets to him and other passengers and directed them to Dobbs House, a restaurant in the airport terminal.
Coke contended that he entered the restaurant with other passengers and selected a seat at a table in the center of the restaurant. However, the hostess told Coke he could not sit there and directed him to a corner table behind a screen, which she described as “reserved for your people.” Coke refused.68 The restaurant policy was reflected in its decor; in the Old South tradition, it displayed a bale of cotton near its entrance and employed an elderly black man in an Uncle Remus-like costume, complete with overalls and a red bandana, for the amusement of white patrons.69
Determined to win social equality for blacks and abolish racial segregation at Atlanta’s airport, Hollowell filed a class action suit on behalf of Coke and other African American citizens against the Dobbs House Restaurant, the City of Atlanta, Mayor Hartsfield, and the airport terminal. Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, and James Nabrit III of the LDF, as well as Birmingham attorney Peter Hall, collaborated with Hollowell in representing Coke.70
By the early 1960s, Hollowell had established a reputation as Georgia’s chief civil rights attorney, and he generated the vast majority of the cases in which he served as chief counsel, including those in which he worked cooperatively with the LDF. However, some cases were turned over to Hollowell from the LDF. For example, Coke initially sought help from Peter Hall in Alabama, and Hall referred the case to the LDF, which subsequently selected Hollowell as the lead counsel to represent Coke.71
Coke actually requested that Hall work on the case and be compensated by the LDF. However, Marshall explained to Coke that the case needed a Georgia lawyer and that he “could not justify any double payment to both Mr. Hollowell and to Mr. Hall for a single job which one lawyer could handle.”72 Coke ultimately conceded, and although Hollowell conferred with Hall on the case and kept him apprised of developments, Hollowell served as the main counsel and received the customary compensation from the LDF— “legal expenses and token payment to the lawyer”—for the litigation.73
Shortly after the filing of the case, in an October 1, 1959, letter to Coke, Hollowell revealed his conviction about the vital role of the courts in advancing civil rights and the importance of black citizens serving as plaintiffs in the struggle for social justice. In his letter to Coke, Hollowell stated: “May I express to you my sincere appreciation and admiration for being willing to stand up for your rights in the matter of being served in the Dobbs House Restaurant? Since it appears that it is only through the courts that we can make some people understand that we are citizens, it is important that citizens like yourself who have a determination to be treated with dignity and respect, become plaintiffs.”74
In the complaint, Hollowell emphasized that Dobbs House operated a restaurant in the airport terminal under lease from the City of Atlanta and refused to serve African Americans except on a segregated basis. According to Hollowell, since the restaurant operated under lease from the City of Atlanta, it could not be considered a private facility. The restaurant’s refusal to serve blacks on an equitable basis therefore constituted a “state action” that violated the rights of black citizens under the equal protection provision of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.75 Hollowell sought an immediate injunction to restrain the airport restaurant from making any distinction in its services based on race.
Hollowell, who had sharpened his spurs in federal court in the Ward and GSCB cases, argued the case with Jack Greenberg before Judge Sloan, who had rendered the partial victory in the GSCB case. To bolster his argument in the Coke case, Hollowell obtained an affidavit from Martin Luther King Jr. concerning the Dobbs House’s refusal to serve him. Though King’s travel schedule initially presented a challenge, Hollowell was able to secure the affidavit prior to the trial. In an August 31, 1959, letter to Hollowell, King wrote, “I regret very much that a rather long absence from the office made it impossible for me to answer your letter. If it isn’t too late, I will be more than happy to give an affidavit concerning both incidents in which I was refused service at the Dobbs House in the Atlanta Airport Terminal. I will be in Atlanta Thursday or Friday of this week for a few hours and I will contact you at that time.”76
Although the City of Atlanta owned and operated the airport, Mayor Hartsfield and the city asserted that the leasing agreement with Dobbs Houses Inc. did not give the city the right to control the operation of the restaurant. Predictably, the defendants used a similar argument to defend their segregationist policies, claiming that Dobbs Houses Inc. was a private corporation, and the City of Atlanta did not have the right to control the restaurant’s operation.
In a city that Mayor Hartsfield had characterized as business friendly and racially progressive, Dobbs Houses Inc. contended that “the segregation, if it amount[ed] to segregation in the dining room, [was] the result of its manager’s own discretion without direction or control from the corporation or from the City of Atlanta and was dictated by his judgment.”77 Counsel for Dobbs Houses further asserted that it was good business to maintain separate seating for white and black patrons and that the failure to maintain separate seating would cost the restaurant in loss of patronage and revenue.
Despite the insistence of the Dobbs Houses attorneys that the restaurant should be permitted to segregate blacks, Hollowell and Greenberg soundly defeated them. Sloan affirmed Hollowell’s contention and ruled that the conduct of Dobbs Houses Inc. represented a state action and that the restaurant’s refusal to serve blacks except on a segregated basis violated Coke’s rights as a black citizen.78 Although the court did not hold Hartsfield personally liable for the racially discriminatory action, the decision was a major victory against the City of Atlanta, the restaurant chain, and the defendants’ attorneys, who were principal partners in what was arguably one of Atlanta’s leading law firms. The ruling forced the restaurant to immediately begin serving blacks on an equitable basis. On the day of Sloan’s decision, Rev. Martin Luther “Daddy” King Sr. and a few other black ministers tested Sloan’s ruling. To the astonishment of black employees, who huddled at the kitchen’s entrance to observe what would happen, “Daddy” King and his colleagues received courteous service.79
Hollowell’s legal work in this case advanced the cause of civil rights in Atlanta, even as the strong opposition he encountered revealed the hypocrisy of Hartsfield’s 1955 assertion that Atlanta was a “city too busy to hate.” While some of Atlanta’s business leaders and politicians were more forward thinking on racial issues during this period than officials in other southern cities such as Birmingham, in essence, it was Hollowell’s victorious federal lawsuit against Hartsfield and the city that helped make Hartsfield’s assertion a reality.