By the early 1960s, Hollowell was increasingly taking on cases in remote areas of Georgia that covered the spectrum from defending the rights of blacks guaranteed by the United States Constitution to defending blacks from an oppressive criminal justice system. His willingness to take on civil rights cases and his reputation for success led to his involvement in virtually every case in the state that involved civil rights violations. John Ruffin, one of the few attorneys who practiced civil rights law in Georgia in the 1960s and later chief justice of the Georgia Court of Appeals, observed that it was difficult to think of a civil rights case during that period that Donald Hollowell did not impact. Ruffin noted: “Whether [Hollowell] did the main work, in terms of preparation at the trial level or not, Donald Hollowell’s name had to be on the pleadings. And everybody that practiced civil rights law wanted Don Hollowell’s physical presence there because he was such a persuasive and gentlemanly lawyer.”1
In one particularly egregious denial of due process, a few months before the Albany Movement, James Fair, a black man in Early County, was arrested, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in a rape and murder case—all within sixty-three hours. Hollowell and C. B. King, with the assistance of law clerk Vernon Jordan, traveled to Reidsville, Georgia, to represent the defenseless Fair.
On Sunday, May 15, 1960, at about one o’clock in the morning, Blakely, Georgia, police arrested Fair for the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl last seen in Fair’s company. Later in the day, Fair was taken to the sheriff’s office, where he allegedly made a full confession before the Early County sheriff and deputies. Without delay, on the following day the Early County grand jury indicted Fair for both the rape and the murder of the child. On Tuesday, May 17, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, upon adjournment of the grand jury, the judge ordered Fair to court for the purpose of arraignment. Before five o’clock that afternoon, without having access to private legal counsel, a court-appointed lawyer, or even the presence of friends and family, Fair entered a plea of guilty, and Judge W. I. Geer swiftly imposed the death sentence.2 Geer, an openly segregationist judge, had included in his campaign platform the declaration that he did not want the support of blacks.3
Objecting to the lightning speed of Fair’s trial and the absence of any legal representation, Hollowell, C. B. King, and Vernon E. Jordan, in association with the NAACP, filed a habeas corpus petition in the Reidsville City Court contending that Fair had not been afforded due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. During the habeas corpus hearing, Fair testified that he did not commit the crimes, but after being cursed, threatened, and told, “Nigger, you deserve to be tarred and feathered” by Sheriff Sid Howell, he pled guilty.4 Fair stated that he pled guilty because he was frightened by Howell’s purported reputation for violence; moreover, Howell had told him that he had previously been able to get a black man a life sentence rather than the death sentence because the man pled guilty. Under cross-examination by Hollowell, Sid Howell’s son, Sid Howell Jr., admitted that his father had shot several men, and Blakely police chief G. H. Owens conceded that Sheriff Howell had “killed several, black and white” during his twenty-four-year tenure as sheriff.5
Alice Fair, Fair’s mother, also testified that she had telephoned Sheriff Howell regarding traveling from Bayonne, New Jersey, to Georgia to secure legal counsel for her son. She related to the court that Howell responded, “It’s no need to you coming down getting a lawyer, because you couldn’t get a white lawyer in the State of Georgia to take the case and a nigger didn’t have a chance.”6 Despite Fair’s and his mother’s testimony, witness statements regarding Sheriff Howell’s propensity for violence, and Hollowell and King’s pleadings on Fair’s behalf, habeas corpus judge R. L. Carr ruled against Fair.7
In addition to the segregated courtroom where court officials relegated blacks to seats in the balcony, every day at the lunch break when white court officials and lawyers went across the street for lunch at the whites-only cafe, Hollowell, King, and Jordan had to make their lunch with items purchased from the local grocery store. After eating bologna sandwiches in Hollowell’s car outside the courtroom for the first two days of the trial, on the third day, one of the black spectators, who had observed the three lawyers eating in Hollowell’s car, invited them for dinner at her home after court adjourned. Jordan recalled:
When we got there, we saw a beautiful sight—a table set for royalty. Her best silver, china and crystal, a lace tablecloth, beautiful fully folded white cloth napkins, and the most exquisite Southern cuisine I’ve ever eaten. Some ten black women and their husbands joined hands with us for grace. Our hostess’s husband said the blessing.
I shall never forget one sentence in that prayer: “Lord, we can’t join the NAACP down here, but thanks to your bountiful blessings, we can feed the NAACP lawyers.”8
Blacks, especially in remote areas of the South, were understandably cautious about involvement with the NAACP or associating with NAACP lawyers. They faced reprisals from whites that might include being beaten, losing their jobs, having their churches bombed, or even being lynched. Despite the dangers, however, a significant number of blacks in towns across the South chose to cast their lot with the civil rights movement.9 In addition to numerous documented accounts of local blacks openly protesting white repression at great risk to their personal safety, blacks also found more subtle ways to espouse the cause of social justice. These ten families in Reidsville found their own unconventional way to support the NAACP lawyers.
While blacks supporting NAACP lawyers faced danger, the lawyers themselves, as well as whites who sought justice for blacks, also placed their personal safety at risk. Shortly after Geer imposed the death sentence on Fair, Fair’s parents, Alice and Percy Fair, secured the services of attorney Nathan Pearlman to investigate the circumstances surrounding the apprehension and conviction of their son. Pearlman, who regularly consulted with Hollowell on Fair’s legal defense, hired private investigator Louis Raino to investigate the matter. Raino traveled to Blakely to attempt to interview witnesses.
On the evening Raino arrived in Blakely, Howell ordered him to appear at the county jail. After Raino’s arrival at the jail, Howell violently abused him, stating, “I am going to kill you, you son of a bitch. You are nothing but a nigger lover, Jew lover and white trash. We don’t want people around like you. It is people like you that try to give us a bad name.”10 Expressing similar abhorrence for Hollowell and C. B. King, Howell told Raino that “if he ever got his hands on those nigger lawyers he would fix them. He said that nobody was going to blacken his name and that those two nigger lawyers better watch out if they ever came to Blakely again.”11
Meanwhile, undeterred by Howell’s threats and convinced that Fair had received no measure of justice, Hollowell and C. B. King appealed the matter to the Supreme Court of Georgia. They convinced the court that Fair’s quick trial and death sentence, coupled with his lack of counsel, resulted in the denial of his rights to due process and benefit of counsel. In a unanimous verdict, the court reversed Fair’s guilty judgment and found that his constitutional right to counsel, guaranteed to him under both the federal and the state constitutions, had been violated. Hollowell and King’s legal efforts not only resulted in a reversal of the habeas corpus ruling; the court also declared the original conviction and death sentence unconstitutional. The legal victory saved Fair from electrocution.
A few months after the Fair ruling, Hollowell traveled to Monticello, Georgia, for what would become his most celebrated criminal case: the Preston Cobb case. Hollowell worked on this demanding case while serving full-time as advocate and lawyer in the Albany Movement. Preston Cobb, a fifteen-year-old black youth, lived with his mother, Leathy Cobb, on a farm owned by seventy-year-old Frank Coleman Dumas. True to the social customs of the Deep South at that time, Leathy cooked, washed, ironed, and did other domestic chores for Dumas. Following an alleged quarrel between the young Cobb and the elderly Dumas on June 1, 1961, Dumas’s shotgun-riddled body was dumped in a ditch near his farm. Moreover, according to police officials, the body had been transported to the ditch in Dumas’s own station wagon. On June 2, the same day Dumas’s body was found, authorities discovered Cobb driving Dumas’s station wagon. He was apprehended and charged with murder.
Upon interrogation by Jasper County officials, Preston Cobb admitted to the murder, claiming Dumas had told him that “he was going to blow [Cobb’s] brains out.”12 On August 16, 1961, an all-white jury in Jasper County Superior Court deliberated only forty-five minutes before sentencing Cobb to die for the shotgun murder of Dumas. Even more troubling than the quick trial, Judge George Carpenter set the date for Cobb’s execution as September 22, 1961, less than forty days after sentencing. J. Ben Warren, Cobb’s court-appointed white attorney, failed to appeal the verdict.13
Vernon Jordan, whose father was also from Monticello, heard of the case from a cousin and drove from Atlanta to Monticello to investigate the matter; he then convinced a frightened and frantic Leathy Cobb to travel to Atlanta to ask Hollowell to represent her son.14 Leathy Cobb desperately needed legal representation for her son but feared reprisals from whites in the town for seeking help from a black attorney. Indeed, it was a dangerous if not deadly undertaking for blacks during this time to challenge white authority, even in defense of a child. Monticello had been the site of the lynching of Daniel Barber, his son, and two married daughters in 1915.15 The vicious lynching of the Barbers and continued white oppression and vigilantism, exemplified in the shooting of Charlie Ware, certainly justified Leathy Cobb’s fears.16 Nevertheless, despite her apprehension she retained Hollowell, and soon afterward the LDF, to represent Preston.
During her first meeting at Hollowell’s law firm in Atlanta, Horace Ward interviewed Leathy Cobb to collect background information and learn what she knew about the incident.17 She revealed that Dumas had cursed and threatened Preston the day before the murder, and that Dumas’s son was an alcoholic who on more than one occasion had threatened to kill his father. She recalled that the father and son often had heated arguments as a result of “Coleman, Jr., constantly trying to borrow money from his daddy and his daddy wouldn’t let him have it.”18
Five days before Cobb’s scheduled electrocution, Hollowell won a stay of execution for his client. In an interview, Cobb later observed that in the context of Jim Crow, his guilty verdict came as no surprise:
When you being tried and you’re a black person and you being tried by a white judge who knows the deceased, white prosecutor who knows the deceased, white lawyer who knows the deceased—all within a fifteen- to twenty-mile span of each other—what do you expect to come out of it? I mean, you know, when you’ve been accused of doing something to somebody white, too? . . . I had no idea what even was going on, until that judge said, “Well, you going to be electrocuted” Hell, I didn’t even know what the word “electrocuted” meant.19
To block the execution and gain time to prepare a defense, Hollowell filed a motion for a new trial. His first legal action was to question the constitutionality of excluding blacks from the jury rolls. Cobb remembered:
There were no blacks on the jury, no nothing, no nothing. And when they did have a list compiled of blacks and whites, they always put a “w” by the white name and a “c” by the black name for colored. You know they weren’t using the Negro word then. They used the “c” for colored. That’s how Mr. Hollowell and them found out what they were doing with the jury pool and stuff. They go down the list, they know who they picking, that’s how I ended up with an all-white jury.20
To prove conclusively that blacks were systematically excluded from the jury rolls, Hollowell, Jordan, and Ward traveled to Jasper County to review jury records. In a crude affirmation that no blacks were on the jury, the clerk of the court assured the men, “There ain’t no niggers on the books.”21 Armed with such evidence, Hollowell immediately filed a flurry of motions with the local superior and state courts, objecting to the “systematic exclusion of Negroes from the jury panels in Jasper County” and appealing for a new trial.22 Hollowell’s motions included an appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, but despite repeated pleadings for a new trial, the lower courts and the Georgia Supreme Court denied all his motions.
At that point, as he had done repeatedly when equal justice eluded blacks in the state courts, Hollowell turned to the federal courts for relief. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial, citing the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries in Jasper County. In Cobb’s new trial, Hollowell challenged the composition of the trial and grand juries on different grounds. The previous challenge was on the grounds that there were competent blacks living in the county who qualified for grand jury service but who had not been selected. In this challenge, Hollowell contended that Georgia created an opportunity to racially discriminate through state action by directing that both grand and trial jurors be selected from the tax rolls, which were maintained on a racially segregated basis.23
Thomas Jackson, a Macon attorney who often collaborated with Hollowell on civil rights cases, assisted Hollowell in the new trial and ensuing court actions.24 In an April 9, 1965, letter to Hollowell regarding compensation for the hours he worked on the Cobb case, Jackson observed, “During the four days of actual trial I was more or less a spare man on call for doing tasks which would keep you and Howard [Moore] at the trial. I feel that I received some compensation during those days by way of experiencing firsthand a splendidly conducted trial by two craftsmen.”25
The Cobb case was a classic example of a defenseless young black man charged with murder of an established white figure in a racially oppressive environment, and the case drew national and international attention. Eleanor Roosevelt became involved in the case, Dutch court officials representing the people of the Netherlands traveled to the United States to advocate for Cobb, and the NAACP established “Preston Cobb Day” to engender support for the case.26
The case would bounce back and forth between state and federal courts for eleven years while Cobb remained in prison and Hollowell’s law partner, Howard Moore, replaced Hollowell as chief counsel. By the time of the third appeal to the United States Supreme Court, Cobb pled guilty, and after receiving credit for time served, prison officials eventually released him in 1972. Cobb retrospectively observed, “I don’t think I never would have got rid of that electric chair or that life sentence had it not been for Hollowell and his office.”27 Based on evidence presented by Hollowell, Ward, and Moore, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the practice of excluding blacks from jury pools using segregated tax digests was unconstitutional.28 Hollowell had succeeded not only in preventing the unjust execution of a black youth but also in exposing the double standard of justice in Georgia’s criminal courts.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s remembrance of how Hollowell cared for his young clients as if they were his own children is evident in Hollowell’s frequent visits to and correspondence with Cobb during his imprisonment. While Hollowell used the visits and communication with Cobb to address legal matters, he also went far beyond legal counsel to help foster Cobb’s educational, spiritual, and physical development. Concerned about Cobb’s written communication skills, in response to a letter from Cobb, Hollowell wrote, “Incidentally, I noticed one place in your letter you say, ‘I haven’t been taking no exercise lately but I will start back, probably tomorrow.’ In that sentence, you have what is known as a double negative. If you used the word ‘any’ you will remove the double negative. Thus, the sentence would then read, ‘I haven’t been taking any exercise lately.’”29 Expressing his appreciation, Cobb responded a few days later: “Thanks for correcting me on that sentence in my last letter to you. I am glad that you brought it to my attention. . . . If you find another incorrect sentence in my letters, when you write back, call it to my attention. For then I will know not to make that same mistake again.”30
In a November 2, 1964, letter to Cobb, Hollowell related the value of studying the word of God as well as persevering in improving his education, revealing the importance of God in Hollowell’s own life:
Preston, there is nothing quite like the solace which one can receive from studying the word of God and knowing that he is near; that he is able to make our burdens light and further capable of protecting us under all circumstances. There is also nothing that is quite like the challenge of the learning process. One day you will be out of prison, and the better educational background that you have, the better will be your prospects of taking advantage of the opportunity of learning more and of achieving a high mark in life after a very humble and sometimes a very late beginning. I was 29 years old before I ever went to law school and was 34 when I started to practice. Thus, you can see that it isn’t so much when you start, but what you do with the opportunity that you have at a given time. Without regard to the negative aspects of your present situation, you have an unusual opportunity to increase your knowledge, increase your thinking, and increase your relationship with God. At the same time, keep exercising daily so that you can keep your body strong.31
In dozens of letters between Hollowell and Cobb, Hollowell provided both legal and personal advice to Cobb, and it is clear that Cobb took the advice to heart and felt sincere gratitude for Hollowell’s help.
Although the 1960s environment included such mass crusades for freedom as the Albany Movement, the Atlanta sit-ins, and the SCLC’s historic Birmingham campaign, numerous other battles occurred outside the limelight of the national media. In crusading militant action aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in transportation, employment, and public accommodations as well as increasing black voter registration, blacks in Augusta, Georgia, were emboldened to fight for racial equality in that city. In February 1962, Hollowell led blacks to victory in federal court in a case against Augusta’s public transit system. In Taylor v. City of Augusta, Hollowell and his law partners defeated Augusta city officials in their efforts to sustain segregation in public transportation. The case stemmed from the arrests of five black students who refused to move to the back of a city bus. Before a three-judge U.S. District Court panel that included Judges Bootle and Tuttle, who had rendered decisions favorable to Hollowell’s clients in the Holmes case, the panel declared the segregation statutes of the City of Augusta, the Public Service Commission, and the State of Georgia unconstitutional. In a broad, sweeping decision, the panel’s declaration prohibited Augusta officials from racially segregating passengers on its buses.32
Less than a month later, Hollowell served as chief counsel in Alexander v. Bibb Transit Company, the federal case that banned segregation in the transit system in Macon, Georgia. The Macon case emanated from the arrests of twelve black students who refused to move to the back of the Bibb Transit buses.33 On February 7, local black leader and businessman William P. Randall; Walter Davis, president of the local NAACP; Rev. A. J. Shaw, president of the Macon Evangelical Ministers’ Alliance; and Ruby Williams, president of the City Federation of Women’s Clubs, sent a letter to transit company president Linton D. Baggs Jr. requesting an end to segregated seating on buses and promoting the employment of black drivers. When Baggs ignored the requests, “Randall began to advocate a boycott” and reached out to the black clergy.34
Inspired and perhaps embarrassed by the youthful protesters’ courage while quiescent adults stood on the sidelines, a few strong-willed black ministers stepped up to challenge the Jim Crow bus statutes in Macon.35 On February 9, in the spirit of Rosa Parks, Reverends Van J. Malone, Ellis S. Evans, Elisha B. Paschal, Hosea R. Rancifer, and Jeff Lorenza Key boarded a public transit bus and took seats near the front. As in the celebrated Parks case, they refused to surrender their seats to white passengers, and police arrested the ministers for violating the city’s segregation statute requiring blacks to sit in the rear. Shortly after their arrest, Randall obtained the ministers’ release on bond. In collaboration with Hollowell and in preparation for a test case against the bus system, Randall and other black leaders strategized with Reverends Cameron Alexander and Booker Chambers for them to take front seats on a bus. The driver of the bus instructed Alexander and Chambers to move to the rear of the bus.36
Later that afternoon, Alexander and Chambers conferred with Hollowell and asked him to represent them and file the test case. Hollowell, who was already involved in a case emanating from the arrests of the twelve student protesters, not only agreed but also became actively involved in local efforts to boycott the buses. On February 16, Alexander and Chambers executed an affidavit notarized by Hollowell for use in the case Alexander et al. v. Bibb Transit Company. Alexander and Chambers contended in the affidavit that “at about 11:35 a.m. on Thursday, February 15, 1962, the affiants boarded the Vinesville Bus of the Bibb Transit Company at the corner of Vinesville and Euclid Streets; that when they had ridden only a short distance, the driver of said bus directed them to take seats in the rear of the bus though there were many vacant seats all over the bus; that desiring not to ride the bus under restrictions based upon race, it was necessary for the affiants to dismount said bus.”37 Alexander and Chambers further declared that it was “the basic right of all citizens desiring to avail themselves of the local transportation system to be able to do so unrestricted by discriminatory practices based upon race.”38
Two days later, and three months after speaking at a mass meeting in Albany, Hollowell the activist addressed a mass meeting of an estimated three thousand blacks, hosted by Reverend Malone at the First Baptist Church in Macon. Hollowell spoke about black history and the struggle for freedom and justice to a standing-room-only crowd that spilled out into the streets.39
In the ensuing weeks, “almost if not all Negro citizens,” who comprised the majority of transit passengers, refused to ride the segregated buses.40 The protesters demanded an end to segregation on the buses and also called for the hiring of black bus drivers and mechanics. In addition to helping to rally direct action, Hollowell the lawyer, seconded by his new law partner Horace Ward, filed affidavits in federal court for a restraining order against the bus company. Before federal judge Bootle on March 1, 1962, Hollowell and Ward won yet another ruling that declared racial segregation in transportation unconstitutional and an injunction that barred the Bibb Transit System from segregating its passengers.41
The activism of Macon’s local black leaders and the interest in their own welfare shown by masses of Macon blacks led Pittsburgh Courier editor Trezzvant Anderson to praise the Macon movement for its local leadership. Macon African American leaders contended that they were fully able to manage civil rights affairs and expressly stated that they did not invite outsiders to direct activities.42 In contrast to the Albany Movement, the Atlanta student sit-ins, and other movements in which civil rights outsiders and national leaders played prominent roles, the Macon movement, similar to civil rights activism in Savannah, was largely an indigenous movement.
While Macon movement leaders rightly took pride in their homegrown civil rights work, Donald Hollowell was an outsider who nevertheless played an important role as an activist lawyer. His leadership behind the scenes and in the courtroom, which did not steal the thunder from local leaders, made his involvement as an outsider more acceptable. Moreover, while local leaders could exhort the masses, stage protests, and negotiate with white officials, they did not possess the training or license to fulfill the legal requirements of their movement. As Georgia’s chief civil rights lawyer among only a handful of such lawyers, Hollowell provided services needed to gain the release of jailed protesters and to legally challenge Jim Crow.
Freedom rider John Lewis described the courage and importance of the few black lawyers to the civil rights movement:
Without the fight, involvement, and commitment and dedication of Donald Hollowell, A. T. Walden, Fred Gray, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. . . . For a black lawyer like Donald Hollowell, Fred Gray, A. T. Walden, or C. B. King to go in some of these places and stand up, they were putting their bodies on the line. We would sit in; we would go on Freedom Rides; we would march; we would get arrested and go to jail. And it took these men to argue our cases, to go before the court, and in many instances these white racist judges were so hostile. . . . I tell you, for them to go into some of these places that they traveled into South Georgia and other places, it was dangerous.43
Hollowell’s defense of protesters in Macon and his handling of the legal case against the segregated transit system, combined with the work of local activists in Macon, resulted in an end to bus segregation in the city. As in the historic Montgomery bus boycott, it was the combination of mass direct action and a protracted legal battle that ended segregation in Macon’s transit system. Hollowell’s legal acumen was inspirational to local blacks. In a letter to Hollowell congratulating him on his legal victory, NAACP president Walter Davis wrote, “May I personally commend you on a job well done in our defense on Mar. 2. I was made proud to be a negro, and I feel that even Baggs and Miller [Macon city attorney] respect your ability. May God continue to bless your dedicated ability.”44
The desegregation of the buses bolstered black protests against segregation in Macon and Augusta. Less than a month after Hollowell’s victory in the Taylor case, four members of the Paine College NAACP chapter in Augusta sat in a white section of a city arena during a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game.45 The tickets had been purchased by the chapter vice president, an extremely light-skinned African American who could easily pass for a white man. Surprisingly, the students were able to integrate seating at the game without incident.
Exuberant over the success, on the following day, in collaboration with the Paine College NAACP chapter, the NAACP Youth Council (composed primarily of high school students) ventured into May Park, an all-white recreational facility. Surrounded by white adults shouting that “no niggers” were allowed in the park, several of the black youths were hit and beaten.46 Not surprisingly, police responded by arresting several of the black protesters. Although no serious injuries occurred, the incident prompted NAACP leaders to demand a meeting with the mayor and city officials to protest segregation in the city. On March 29, after a series of meetings between members of the Chamber of Commerce, store owners with lunch counters, and NAACP leaders, Augusta’s lunch counters were desegregated without any serious incident.
However, tensions remained high, and threats of violence continued to surround the NAACP’s direct-action campaigns. Enraged by the notion of blacks dining with whites, some whites violently resisted desegregation of the lunch counters. On April 7, William Didley, a member of the Paine College NAACP and vice-chair of the Paine student movement, was stabbed by a white man outside the H. L. Green lunch counter. Constance Curry, the first white member of SNCC’s executive committee, saw the assailant emerge from a crowd of whites and stab Didley. In keeping with the customary treatment of blacks abused by whites at the time, Didley was quickly charged with disorderly conduct and carrying a weapon, and his attacker was never charged. In another incident at the Varsity Club Market on April 17, whites hurled rocks and other missiles at the protesters, and the protesters retaliated. The incident reached its peak when a white man tried to run down a black protester with his car, and policemen blocked the streets and fired their weapons in the air in an attempt to quell the disturbance.47
Two days later, the spiraling violence led Rev. Theodore Green, advisor to the youth council, to summon NAACP field secretary Vernon Jordan for help. To stem the escalating racial tension and violence, Jordan and local NAACP leaders patrolled the crisis area surrounding the Varsity Market to discourage picketing and other forms of protest. Amid picketers and NAACP patrols, police also stopped cars of white hoodlums and confiscated various types of deadly weapons. Although Jordan and local NAACP members contained the violence surrounding the Varsity Market, Lessie Lee Luttes, a sixteen-year-old white youth, was slain across town in a predominantly black neighborhood.48 Luttes was shot in the front of his head with a .45-caliber pistol, and some gunshot pellets were found in the back of his head. George Lewis, one of his companions, was also wounded by gunshot pellets to his head and body.
For three consecutive nights prior to the fatal incident, marauding cars of rock-throwing white youths had raided black neighborhoods. While the tragic incident was unjustifiable, it is evident that the white youths were up to violent mischief: a rifle and a bag of rocks were found in the vehicle in which Luttes was killed.49 In retaliation for the raids on black neighborhoods, on the night of April 19, a group of twenty to thirty blacks aged fourteen to twenty-two and one black adult fifty-five years of age, some armed with shotguns and pistols, gathered at the Delta Manor playground. The group converged on the playground allegedly to prevent a recurrence of the previous night’s incident in which “a group of whites had come onto the playground and run black boys away.”50 Police subsequently charged nine of the blacks, including six teenagers, with murder, while six others were indicted for a riot in connection with the slaying.51
The defendants’ parents retained John Ruffin Jr. and John D. Watkins, two young black attorneys in the city who had been in practice less than a year. Given their lack of experience, especially in such a racially polarizing, high-profile case, and in light of the fact that George Hains, the solicitor in the case, was chomping at the bit for death sentences, Ruffin, Watkins, and local NAACP officials contacted the national office of the NAACP for legal assistance. NAACP general counsel Robert Carter and LDF lawyer Frank D. Reeves became involved in the case and asked Hollowell to go to Augusta to serve as chief local counsel.
The nine defendants in the murder case became known as the “Delta Manor Nine.” When the case came to trial, in a racially charged courtroom with the lives of the defendants on the line, Hollowell carefully and meticulously presented the opening arguments on behalf of his clients. He contended that the charge of murder required malice aforethought, a motivation that was not evident. Moreover, he argued that the young white men provoked the incident and insisted that the city itself was at fault for failing to take steps to quell rowdy whites, who for several days had come into black neighborhoods throwing rocks and engaging in other forms of harassment.52
John Ruffin, Hollowell’s mentee, who worked with Hollowell on the case, summed up Hollowell’s lawyering in the Delta Nine case:
I got a chance to work with Donald Hollowell on a murder case. . . . There were eight, maybe ten, black boys who were charged with killing a white youth, and it was quite an experience. I learned what preparation really means. I learned what the ability to analyze and articulate really means, and it was almost as though that experience put the capping on my law school career because I could see the things I had studied in law school become much more meaningful to me in that setting. To sit back and watch him was just like listening to a symphony. If anybody wants to know how to try a case, how to act with civility, they need to study Don Hollowell.53
Hollowell’s meticulous lawyering was not in vain, for the all-white jury delivered a surprising verdict: all nine defendants were acquitted of the murder charge. Given the tenor of the times, many white and black observers alike were shocked to learn that none of the defendants was sentenced to be executed or to life imprisonment. Hollowell recalled prosecutor George Hains quietly and courteously whispering to him after the trial, “You did a great job. After I heard your opening argument, I knew we’d never be able to give anyone the chair.”54
Just a few months after the Delta Nine case and Hollowell’s earlier victory in desegregating the Macon Transit System, Hollowell, overwhelmed with civil rights litigation including the Preston Cobb case, sent his law partner Howard Moore to Macon for a coroner’s inquest. The inquest related to the shooting of A. C. Hall, a black teenager in Macon, Georgia. Moore recalled that he walked into the office one morning and Hollowell handed him one volume of the Georgia statutes, instructing him to read the statute relating to coroners en route to Macon. Hollowell told him that some people would meet him on the steps of the county courthouse in Macon and to take it from there. Hollowell then rushed out of the office for a court appearance in downtown Atlanta.
According to Moore, Hollowell seldom had office meetings and did not discuss with partners which cases they would undertake but rather assigned them perfunctorily to the first person he encountered in the office or at Paschal’s restaurant across the street. Moore observed:
The main reason things were hectic was there were so few African American lawyers in Georgia, which had an estimated African American population in excess of one million. Hollowell was known throughout the state as a lawyer who would stand up to “the Man.”
Working class people throughout the state trusted him and lawyers associated with him completely and engaged him to represent them in a broad spectrum of legal matters.55
A. C. Hall, a fifteen-year-old African American, had been fatally shot by a Macon policeman. On October 13, 1962, police dispatched J. L. Durden and J. T. Brown to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Barnett Hopper to respond to a call regarding a pistol reportedly stolen from their vehicle, which was parked in their driveway. Cruising with the officers, the Hoppers identified Hall on a nearby street as the suspected thief, whom Mrs. Hopper had seen walking away from their vehicle. Seeking to apprehend Hall, the foursome reported that Hall ran, then turned, and made a motion that the officers interpreted as an attempt to draw a weapon, which led one of the officers to fire a fatal shot.56
On October 19, 1,500 blacks marched on Macon City Hall protesting Hall’s shooting. Marching with black armbands, the group met at the First Baptist Church for a prayer service and were led to city hall by William P. Randall and other leaders of Macon’s NAACP branch. Branch officials enlisted Hollowell’s help, and Hollowell sent Moore to represent Hall’s mother at the inquest. Despite the haphazard assignment and little preparation for the hearing, Moore convinced the judge to recess the hearing until the following week, and Hollowell returned to Macon with Moore for the inquest.57
Moore recalled Hollowell’s lawyering and witnessed firsthand blacks’ affection for Hollowell when Moore was dispatched to represent Hall’s mother at the inquest. His recollection is powerful testimony to both:
When I got down to Bibb County and went to the courthouse, there were about three hundred Negroes on the steps. And I went into the courthouse, and there were about three hundred, or as many as they could get, in the balcony upstairs. And when I walked in the courtroom the people upstairs, the black people, said, “That ain’t Hollowell.” [laughs] You know? “Where’s Hollowell? That ain’t Hollowell” . . . So I said, well, I’ll act like Hollowell, I’ll just object in the loudest voice I can. And then people upstairs in the balcony said, “Well, it ain’t Hollowell, but he sounds like Hollowell.” [laughs]
And that was the A. C. Hall case, where a fifteen-year-old African American had been shot in the back by a police officer in Macon. And I hollered and screamed and objected as much as I could that afternoon, and we got a recess until Friday of that week or the following week. And when I came back, I came back with Hollowell. And it’s one of the most brilliant cross-examinations I’ve ever witnessed in my life—Hollowell examining the police officer who shot A. C. Hall. Because the story was that Hall was approaching the police officer armed with some type of weapon. And the officer, fearing for his safety and the safety of others, shot A. C. Hall in self-defense.
But the true story turns out to be that when the officer shot A. C. Hall, Hall was approximately fifty feet from him, and his back was to the officer. And Hollowell literally had the officer on the stand, under his cross-examination, physically turn A. C. Hall around, so that his back would be to the officer at the time he was shot. And when the officer at the moment of realization of what the effect of his answers to Hollowell’s cross-examination were, it seems as though tears came to his eyes. And I’ve never seen that before or since, when a lawyer just takes complete control of a witness and binds that witness to his will, not with shouting and with screaming, but with systematic, well-structured, well-placed questions.58
Hollowell’s legal skill and victory in the desegregation of the transit system had made him a celebrity among blacks in Macon. Outraged by the killing of Hall, hundreds of blacks showed up for the coroner’s inquest; some filled the seats in the courtroom balcony, where blacks were permitted to sit, while others stood outside on the courthouse steps. Before the mass of enraged blacks in the courtroom balcony, Hollowell pointed out that Hall had been shot in the back and that no evidence had been presented that he had a gun. Hollowell argued at the inquest that there was no justification for “this boy to have been killed,” charging, “I say it is murder.”59
Astoundingly, Hollowell and Moore convinced the all-white coroner’s jury to indict Durden and Brown. The jury concluded that Hall died from a bullet fired by either Durden or Brown and that in their opinion, it was murder. Accordingly, Durden and Brown were booked on murder charges and incarcerated in the Bibb County jail. Hollowell, who had convinced a panel of federal judges earlier in the year to allow blacks to ride on Macon buses on a nonsegregated basis, had now convinced an all-white jury to jail two white policemen. Hollowell’s success in changing social patterns was astonishing in the Jim Crow town and emblematic of his influence on legal and social change in Georgia.
The Delta Nine and A. C. Hall cases are exemplars of dozens of cases that Hollowell championed in the 1960s. Hollowell’s transformative legal work during this time helped turn the tide in Georgia toward racial equality. He continued to challenge a wide spectrum of discriminatory laws, and more often than not, he continued to win. Hollowell battled everything from housing discrimination to a health-care system that relegated blacks to second-class treatment at public hospitals, such as Atlanta’s huge metropolitan Grady Memorial Hospital.
Despite rigid segregation in Atlanta, protests such as the Atlanta student sit-ins, and the arrest and imprisonment of Martin Luther King Jr., the city had been relatively successful in its efforts to portray itself as moderate with regard to race relations. Oddly enough, it was blatant racial discrimination in housing that attracted intense national and international criticism and marred Atlanta’s reputation, as conceived by Mayor Hartsfield, as the city “too busy to hate.”60 Ironically, Hartsfield’s successor, Mayor Ivan Allen, convinced the city’s board of aldermen to enact an ordinance permitting the construction of barricades between the black and white sections of the city. In December 1962, racial barricades were erected in southwest Atlanta across Peyton and Harlan Roads to create a so-called buffer zone between black and white residential areas.61 While the national press and black- and white-owned Atlanta papers alike denounced the roadblocks, most whites in the area embraced them as protection against blacks moving into their white neighborhoods.62
The city’s decision to erect the barricades was spurred, in large measure, by black physician Clinton Warner, who purchased a home in the all-white Peyton Forest residential neighborhood of southwest Atlanta. Warner, who had a higher level of education than many white residents of the neighborhood, was a U.S. Army veteran who had participated in the D-Day invasion. But to white residents, first and foremost he was black, and his level of education, training, or patriotism did not matter.
Incensed Atlanta activists, both black and white, picketed the racial barricades. Likening them to the Berlin Wall, they carried protest signs with mottos such as “Atlanta’s Image: A Berlin Wall” and “We Want No Warsaw Ghetto.”63 Howard Moore recalled:
We called it the Berlin Wall case, but technically I think it was Warner against the City of Atlanta. [Dr.] Clinton Warner was the first African American to move into the area. There were many whites in the area who objected to Dr. Warner moving into the area. And not only didn’t they want him to move in the area, but they also didn’t want other blacks to move into the area. So they went to the city council and convinced the city council to pass an ordinance that required the construction of a physical barricade across Peyton Road.64
Hollowell filed an injunction before Judge George P. Whitman in Fulton County Superior Court against the City of Atlanta for erecting the barricades. In addition to Hollowell’s outrage at the attempt by the city to legally sanction Jim Crow housing practices, he had a personal stake in the matter, for Warner was his friend and personal physician. Hollowell’s case received some help from unexpected and unlikely allies, in particular a white woman who lived in the area and was upset because she could no longer conveniently travel to her residence, because the wall obstructed the flow of traffic for whites as well as blacks. On the witness stand, in a richly ironic moment, she observed, “They treatin’ us like niggers!” Even for some whites who opposed racial equality, the tremendous impracticality and inconvenience of the barricades outweighed their racial intolerance of blacks.
Despite the racially polarizing case against Mayor Allen and the City of Atlanta, Hollowell and Allen maintained a cordial relationship. Concerned about the escalating racial tensions, Allen sought Hollowell’s counsel in an off-the-record discussion about the barricades. Hollowell recalled the mayor asking, “Don, what do you think I ought to do?” Hollowell responded, “Mayor Allen, when you’re stuck in the mire, if you just try to crawl out, you get even muddier. Sometimes you just have to leap out all at once to the high ground. Then you can get some solid footing and move ahead.”65
Though Allen did not preempt the court process, on March 3, 1963, Judge Whitman affirmed Hollowell’s contention and ruled that the city’s actions were unconstitutional. A few hours after the court order was issued, Atlanta’s Berlin Wall, which had become a national embarrassment for Mayor Allen and the city, came down.66 Noting Hollowell’s victory, in a front-page story, the Atlanta Inquirer reported, “Attorney D. L. Hollowell and his young associates, attorneys Horace Ward and Howard Moore, won the important court victory that toppled Atlanta’s infamous Peyton and Harlan Road barricades.”67
Revealing his desire for social justice, which transcended his courtroom victory, Hollowell observed, “The importance of the recent court decision in spelling out the law on racial barriers, buffer zones, and the like, cannot be overemphasized. I feel that over and above the decision itself, the most important aspect of the ‘barrier’ situation was the ultimate solidarity shown in this community. My sincere hope is that the time will soon come when one’s color will not determine where we can buy or live.”68
Shortly thereafter, blacks moved into the Peyton Forest neighborhood. Sadly, although Hollowell had defeated the legal sanction of residential segregation and protected the constitutional rights of blacks, the racism that buttressed housing segregation persisted. By the end of July 1963, most “white families had sold their homes to black buyers and abandoned the neighborhood.”69
Segregation in public places throughout the state kept Hollowell and his partners busy, working in partnership with the LDF, seeking to dismantle the persistent practice. Hollowell law partner William Alexander partnered with the LDF on litigation that commenced in 1963, when Charles E. Newton and members of the Board of Managers of Baconsfield Park brought a petition against the City of Macon, as trustee under the will of U.S. senator Augustus O. Bacon. Newton and the board asserted that the City of Macon was failing and refusing to enforce the provisions of Bacon’s will with regard to the park and asked that the city be removed as a trustee. The City of Macon “alleged that it could not legally enforce segregation.”70 The park was created on land that was given to the City of Macon in trust by Bacon for the benefit of “white women, white girls, white boys and white children of the City of Macon.”71 Senator Bacon stated in the will that “while he had only the kindest feeling for the Negroes he was of the opinion that ‘in their social relations the two races (white and negro) should be forever separate.’”72
Rev. E. S. Evans and other black leaders in Macon filed an intervention contending that the restriction in the trust limiting the use of the park to whites was illegal. After the City of Macon integrated the park, following a Supreme Court decision that the park could no longer be segregated, Bacon’s heirs sued to have the land on which the park was situated returned to them. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the right of Bacon’s heirs to have the park land returned to them.
In its ruling in favor of the heirs, the Supreme Court refused to utilize the doctrine of cy pres to allow Macon to continue to operate the park. The Georgia cy pres statutes stipulate that “when a valid charitable bequest is incapable for some reason of execution in the exact manner provided by the testator, donor, or founder, a court of equity will carry it into effect in such a way as will as nearly as possible effectuate his intention.”73 Use of the land as a park open to all was a comparable purpose consistent with the purpose for which Bacon had deeded the property to the City of Macon, with the exception of one odious purpose: racial discrimination.74 This case represented the kinds of cases throughout Georgia that, while not as predominant as school cases or defending the civil rights of black plaintiffs, nonetheless consumed considerable time and effort among the lawyers in the Hollowell firm.
In February 1964, Hollowell and Ward partnered with the LDF to challenge segregation at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, including the second-class treatment of black doctors, nurses, and dentists. Black doctors and dentists were barred from membership in local and state medical associations, and black nurses were denied opportunities to attend the white nursing school at Grady Hospital. The handful of black doctors practicing in the city were denied membership in the local medical society and thus excluded from membership in the American Medical Association. In the same fashion, the city’s seventeen black dentists were excluded from the American Dental Association.75 Protesting this discrimination, blacks demanded complete integration of Grady Hospital, including permission for physicians and nurses of both races to treat patients of both races. They also demanded immediate improvements in the deplorable conditions at Hughes-Spalding Pavilion, the black wing of Grady Hospital.76
In an effort to guarantee black health-care professionals equal opportunity under the law, Ward and Hollowell were joined by Jack Greenberg, James Nabritt II, and Michael Meltsner in representing three groups of plaintiffs who filed suit before federal judge Frank Hooper against the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority and the Georgia Dental Association. The original suit was filed by Dr. Roy C. Bell, who had unsuccessfully applied for membership in the all-white Georgia Dental Association. The plaintiffs now included black physicians excluded from local and state medical associations, black dentists excluded from local and state dental associations, and black nursing school applicants relegated to a substandard “colored” nursing school at Grady Hospital. One of the lawsuits also challenged the denial of staff appointments for black dentists at Grady Hospital.77
Following various legal obstructions by the defendants in an effort to get the case dismissed, the medical associations and Grady Hospital entered consent judgments with the plaintiffs, resulting in the desegregation of the nursing school at Grady, the admission of black physicians and dentists to the staff at Grady, and the enrollment of black physicians as members of the medical associations.78 The dental associations stubbornly refused to consent, contending that the associations were merely voluntary clubs of professional men whose acts were not governed by the Fourteenth Amendment.79
Ward and Hollowell argued that because state law prescribed that the Georgia Dental Association would nominate practicing dentists to the Georgia Board of Dental Examiners, only white dentists could be nominated. Hooper summarily rejected the defendants’ arguments that the association was a voluntary, private organization and found the exclusion of blacks from state and district dental associations to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.80 Horace Ward, Hollowell’s former law client and now law partner, served as lead counsel in a substantial legal victory before the judge who had ruled against him in his own lawsuit to enter the University of Georgia.
Notwithstanding Hollowell’s cooperative relationship with the LDF and the fact that he and his partners served as the LDF’s local counsel of choice in Georgia cases, even with the LDF there were at times disagreements about appropriate fees for legal work. In the Bell cases, Ward expressed disappointment to the LDF about their allotted fee for handling the cases. In a February 17, 1964, letter to Michael Meltsner, Ward stated, “I am of the opinion that $750.00 is not an adequate fee for handling this case. . . . Attached hereto is an exhibit list on some of the services rendered by local counsel in this case. On the basis of the foregoing, I feel that it would be in order that the matter of a fee for the case be re-examined with the idea in mind of allowing a higher fee than $750.00.”81
Undoubtedly such all-encompassing cases as the Bell cases, along with a consistently high volume of civil rights cases, limited the degree to which Hollowell and his partners could accept other legal work to earn a living. For example, in a July 2, 1964, letter to Hollowell requesting an increase in salary, Howard Moore recounted:
As you may recall, on December 30, 1963, by letter, I accepted the position of Law-Associate-Clerk at a basic salary of $6,000.00 per year, which I then considered “fantastically low for a person with my experience and training.” I accepted this low salary for a conditional period of six months on the assumption that I would be earning several thousand dollars additionally from private practice.82
As you know, the position of Law-Associate-Clerk has actually been so demanding that I have realized less than $400.00 during the six month period from private practice. . . .
While the work is interesting and stimulating and profitable in that respect, my responsibilities are such that rewards as mentioned are in a personal family sense material and time consuming deprivations of those closest to me, my wife and daughter.83
In consideration of the value of the Hollowell firm’s work with the LDF and in response to Moore’s request, a few weeks later Jack Greenberg increased the monthly allotment to Hollowell from $750.00 to $875.00. In his letter informing Hollowell of the increase, Greenberg stated, “The purpose of this increase is to allow you to compensate Howard Moore in the amount of $100 per month more than heretofore.”84
Later in 1964, Hollowell’s law firm took legal action to dismantle the lingering segregation in public establishments in Atlanta. Despite the historic Atlanta sit-ins in 1960 and 1961, rigid segregation persisted in many organizations. When three students from Turner Theological Seminary, a predominantly black Episcopal seminary, sought service at Atlanta’s Pickrick restaurant, Lester Maddox, the restaurant’s owner and a staunch segregationist, dissuaded them from entering by brandishing a pistol. Maddox, later elected Georgia’s governor in 1967, was determined to hold the line on segregation in his well-known restaurant.
As black Atlantans stepped up efforts to desegregate the restaurant, Maddox and his segregationist cronies wielded ax handles that Maddox kept on hand to repel any would-be black customers. Maddox’s outrageous and physically threatening behavior against blacks seeking service at his restaurant brought him into the national media spotlight. Despite his buffoon-like personality and all the trimmings of a racist publicly denigrating blacks, Maddox was, in fact, a wily politician who represented the racial sentiments of the masses of white southerners.
Although Maddox won the 1967 gubernatorial election, in a lawsuit led by Hollowell’s law partner William Alexander, he was resoundingly defeated in the 1964 court case against his segregationist establishment. LDF lawyers Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, and Michael Meltsner assisted the Hollowell law firm with the case. On October 5, 1964, the U.S. District Court, Northern District, Atlanta, rendered a permanent injunction preventing Maddox from refusing to admit blacks to the premises, failing or refusing to serve them, or refusing to provide any accommodations accorded to other races.85
Despite this decisive legal victory, just a few blocks across town, Atlanta’s Heart of Atlanta motel stubbornly refused to serve blacks at its restaurant. Again Hollowell’s firm led the charge in a successful federal lawsuit to enforce the rights of blacks to receive service at the restaurant. On the very day the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was signed into law, Moreton Rolleston Jr., owner of the Heart of Atlanta, appealed the decision in a suit against the federal government challenging the constitutionality of the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Rolleston alleged that the act infringed on his private-property rights to restrict blacks from patronizing his establishment. The court flatly rejected the argument. On December 14, 1964, the United States Supreme Court upheld the validity of the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act, which ultimately led to the shattering of blatant segregation in Atlanta’s restaurants and motels.86 Importantly, it was the convergence of direct action by black Atlantans who demanded service, litigation by lawyers such as Hollowell, and the Civil Rights Act that resulted in comprehensive desegregation of public accommodations. Although Atlanta city fathers bragged that Atlanta had “voluntarily desegregated,” student activists correctly observed that comprehensive public accommodations desegregation occurred only after restaurants and motels had been “internationally embarrassed,” and only after Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act.87
Between 1962 and 1969, Hollowell and his partners also challenged lingering segregation in a panoply of public school systems across the state. Two significant cases occurred at opposite ends of the state, in Albany and in Brunswick. In 1963, Hollowell and C. B. King won a victory in U.S. District Court after Dougherty County School officials in Albany refused to end rigid school segregation. The court ordered an end to the segregated school system operated by the Dougherty County Board of Education and further ordered the implementation of a desegregation plan.88
In Harris v. Gibson, a more disturbing case the same year in coastal Georgia, a federal district court issued an order that upheld segregation in Brunswick, Georgia. The court issued an injunction preventing six black youths from attending all-white Glynn Academy in Brunswick. In this case a group of white parents objected to a voluntary plan by the Glynn County School Board to desegregate its schools and filed a federal lawsuit. At the behest of the white parents, rabid segregationist Frank Scarlett, United States District Court judge for the Southern District of Georgia, issued a restraining order that halted the plan and prevented the black students from entering Glynn Academy.
Hollowell, Ward, and Constance Baker Motley appealed the matter before Judge Griffin Bell, presiding for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Bell granted a stay of Judge Scarlett’s decision, allowing the six black students to attend Glynn Academy until the court rendered final judgment. The courts later combined the case with a related Savannah, Georgia, school desegregation case (Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education).,89 In accordance with the original contention of Hollowell and his partners in the Harris case, Judge Bell declared that the Glynn and Savannah-Chatham schools were indisputably being operated on a segregated basis in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.90
In addition to handling school cases in Albany and Savannah, Hollowell served as chief counsel in cases in Macon and Augusta, working cooperatively with the LDF and local counsel. Following Hollowell’s counsel in the Bibb Transit Company and A. C. Hall cases in Macon in 1962, in 1963 he served as counsel in the Board of Public Education and Orphanage for Bibb County v. E. S. Evans et al. case tried in Bibb County Superior Court. The judge in the case issued a declaratory judgment invalidating sections of the Board of Education’s charter to allow for the desegregation of Bibb County Schools.91
Although the state court decision was an important victory for Hollowell and the LDF, in a July 12, 1963, letter from LDF counsel Derrick Bell to Hollowell, Bell observed that in light of the politics of segregation, it was unlikely that the favorable state court decision would result in the desegregation of the Macon schools. Bell emphasized the work yet to be done in the federal courts to achieve school desegregation, writing:
Dear Don:
I received your letter of July 8 containing the very favorable opinion from the state court in the Macon School matter. You and local counsel are to be congratulated. Let us hope that the decision in the Augusta case is also favorable.
While it is certainly possible that the two school boards will voluntarily begin desegregation as a result of the state court decisions, it is the experience of this office that political considerations make it extremely difficult for Board members to initiate desegregation plans in the absence of court orders. . . .
For this reason, I believe that the potential plaintiffs in Macon and Augusta will be best served by our going forward with our plans to file suit in both areas as soon as we can.
I hope this letter clarifies our position as to these cases so that we can get both matters before the courts at an early date.92
In the ensuing years, Hollowell, LDF lawyers, local attorneys John Ruffin and John D. Watkins in Augusta, and local counsel Thomas M. Jackson in Macon would guide the cases through the federal courts.93 In addition to legal actions by local officials to sustain segregation, even when court orders demanded desegregation, officials refused to fully comply with the court decisions. For example, after a black student was admitted to the formerly all-white Gracewood School in Augusta in connection with the Acree case, the student was not permitted to ride the Gracewood bus. Revealing the prolonged and arduous work such cases demand, Ruffin asked Hollowell for advice on the matter and urged him to include the school’s refusal to allow the student to ride the bus in a plea to the court.94
Hollowell also established important legal groundwork for several United States Supreme Court and federal appeals court cases. In NAACP v. Over-street, United States V. Jackson, and Rabinowitz v. United States, Hollowell was involved in cases that led to judicial decisions protecting the First Amendment rights of organizations and the right of blacks to serve on federal juries.95 In the 1963 Overstreet v. NAACP case and subsequent 1966 NAACP V. Overstreet case, Hollowell filed pleadings and argued on behalf of the NAACP to protect the right of African Americans to demonstrate against segregation.96 The case involved the defense of protesters and the Savannah branch of the NAACP for demonstrations against a Savannah, Georgia, merchant who allegedly slapped and kicked a fourteen-year-old black boy. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s verdict that the NAACP was liable for damages to the store owner’s place of business resulting from the demonstrations.
However, in an argument led by NAACP counsel Robert Carter, the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling that juries hostile to the aims of an organization in the educational or political field, unless carefully confined by meticulous instructions and judicial supervision, can deliver crushing verdicts that may stifle organized dissent. This case, for which Hollowell laid pivotal legal groundwork, established a judicial precedent that was vital in sustaining NAACP activism in protests and demonstrations nationally. The case solidified laws that protected the collective right to organize and protest.97
Two other 1966 cases in which Hollowell and C. B. King developed legal foundations with sweeping implications were United States v. Jackson and its companion case, Rabinowitz v. United States, both of which arose from the demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. The precedent-setting work of Hollowell and King in these cases constituted an important attack on the way federal grand and trial juries were composed. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the convictions in both cases because the method by which the jury list was compiled resulted in the impermissible exclusion of blacks and violated federal civil rights statutes. The cases ultimately had an impact on the establishment of the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, which protects the right of all people to serve on federal juries.98
In assessing Hollowell’s pathbreaking civil rights work in Georgia, it is important to examine his integration of grassroots activism and lawyering. Hollowell led the group of community leaders who carefully selected Holmes and Hunter to challenge segregation at the University of Georgia, worked behind the scenes with Atlanta student sit-in activists, helped organize protesters in Macon, and emboldened demonstrators in Albany to continue their protests. In each of these cases, he also served in a prominent role as counsel to the plaintiffs or protesters, including joining C. B. King to represent the Freedom Riders and hundreds of other protesters in the Albany Movement. While pickets, boycotts, sit-ins, and other forms of direct action played a vital role in civil rights progress, victories were often ultimately won in the courts by Hollowell and his colleagues. Hollowell’s federal court victories ended segregation in the public transit systems in Augusta and Macon, and the successful appeal by Hollowell, C. B. King, and Motley of Judge Elliott’s order to restrain protesters in Albany allowed the demonstrations to continue and established an important legal precedent protecting the rights of civil protesters.
At the request of clients who had learned of his reputation as a successful civil rights lawyer or at the behest of the NAACP, Hollowell regularly crisscrossed the state in his car investigating civil rights complaints for his clients, often without an escort and always without a weapon. It was common for black clients on death row to see him as perhaps their last hope to avoid the electric chair. Among many letters from his office files requesting his legal intervention, the following examples show both the desperation of prospective clients and their hope that Hollowell would rescue them from long sentences or the impending death chamber.
Dear Mr. Hollowell:
Please be advised that we are in need of help very bad, our grandson and nephew is about to go to the electric chair for a crime he is not guilty of.
Samuel Edward Smith got into a fight on his job with some white men and he was locked up for it, after that he was accuse [sic] of several cases of rape made on white women dating back to when he was thirteen (13) years old, in fact he was found guilty by an all-white jury of raping a white woman when he was only thirteen years old, the woman was brought back to Augusta from Texas to identify him. She claims he raped her in 1947 when he was only 13 years old. . . .
Signed Julia Jackson
Freddie Jackson99
Dear Sir Mr. Hollowell,
I am Robert L. Johnson. Sir I am writing this letter concerning my case. On the 6-9-58, I was tried and convicted of rape in Fulton County. I am a poor man and I was not guilty of that crime. I received a sentence of 20 years. . . .
Mr. Hollowell I can’t do anything for myself because I am without money and I don’t have no help. I am a colored man. I am in good health. If you can help me with my parole, I be willing and will pay you when I am out. . . . Will tell you anything you wants to no about me. I am praying that you will help me. Please answer.
Robert L. Johnson100
Dear Sir Attorney Hollowell.
I come before you in the name of the Most High and the Blessed Peace be with you and yours! . . . I [am] serving a life sentence in Reidsville, Ga. for a charge of robbery of a grocery store. . . . All of this happened in Bartow County, Cartersville, Ga. in July of 1961. . . . A man come to the jail and told me that if I didn’t plead guilty that I would get the chair. Later on the day of my trial they had beaten me so badly until I feared my sanity and my life. . . . [I] was denied a bond and the right to an attorney.
They beat me and made me sign a confession. . . . I no I have a chance with your help. And I thank you for your kindness in advance.
Yours sincerely,
Howard K. Patterson101
Equally troubling as the letters from individuals pleading with Hollowell to address their plight are letters such as the following, written by black inmates at the Crisp County, Georgia, Prison Work Camp regarding prison conditions.
Dear Sir:
We inmates at Crisp Co. is seeking your assistance or someone that you could influence to help us. . . . They still beat colored here. That one really hurts. Prisoners here with afflicted leg and heart ailments have a hard time. We get no checkup or doctor. The first I seen in eight months was a Cordelean and he only glance at the prisoners here. No examination whatsoever. Cursed, we are cursed extremely every day. . . . The building is poorly heated. In Summer the window remain tightly closed; it be sickly hot in here. All white prisoners are made trustees and given light chores. While colored prisoners are put in the bull gang no matter how old or unable they may be. We are overworked in summer. We work from 5:50 to 7:00 p.m. . . . Our mail is burned, especially mail going to lawyers or seeking help. We have a prisoner here who was shot, then arm broken and thrown in the hole; he never saw a doctor. Another one was knocked down, eardrum busted by a white man that asked him to dig a ditch and he refused . . .
Desperately yours,
Crisp County Inmates102
Hollowell personally responded to countless letters from individuals in dire situations, including inmates in penal institutions throughout the state. His personal correspondence was generally followed up with investigations and legal action that often required him to travel to remote areas of the state that were hostile to civil rights and especially to a civil rights attorney.
Despite such legal victories as the Nash case, in which Hollowell saved Nash from the electric chair, he did not always prevail on behalf of his clients. For example, in 1953, Paul Wright, an eighteen-year-old black youth from Social Circle, Georgia, was convicted of the murder of Sarah Belle Daniel. Wright, his mother, Jennie, and his two brothers lived and worked as sharecroppers on the farm of Sarah Belle Daniel and her husband, Elmer Daniel, in Walton County. During Wright’s trial, Walton County sheriff and Georgia Bureau of Investigation officials testified that Wright had confessed to the murder. However, Wright told the jury, “I did not kill her. . . . The reason I told them in Atlanta that I killed her was because I was scared; I didn’t kill her. One of them told me if I didn’t say it they would give me a pill and I would say it. If I had killed her I would have left the same day. They just scared me to death is the reason I told them that I killed her.”103
Shortly after the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed Wright’s conviction and death sentence on October 13, 1953, Jennie Wright sent Hollowell a desperate plea for help to save her son from electrocution. Hollowell investigated the matter and argued for a thirty-day stay of execution, which was granted by Governor Herman Talmadge on December 7, 1953. Hollowell then appealed to the parole board to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. However, on December 31, 1953, the board denied the application to commute the sentence.
In a January 2, 1954, letter to Jennie Wright, Hollowell acknowledged that he had exhausted all legal efforts and urged her to turn to God.
This morning I received a notice from the State Board of Pardons and Parole informing me that the Board has denied our application to commute the death sentence of your son, Paul, to life imprisonment.
I think you understand and appreciate the fact that every effort was made in your son’s behalf. . . .
In this New Year, may I commend you to the Almighty who can sustain you through days of joy and sadness. He is all-knowing and will be the presiding judge in the court of last resort—have faith in Him.
Sincerely yours.
D. L. Hollowell104
Less than a month later, on January 22, 1954, the State of Georgia executed nineteen-year-old Paul Wright. Hollowell defended Wright shortly after he started his practice, but this case is illustrative of those he litigated throughout the 1950s and 1960s, often venturing to such dangerous areas of the state as Walton County, the site of the lynching of George Dorsey, Dorothy Dorsey Malcom, Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger Malcom.
Despite the danger from those opposed to civil rights for blacks, as evidenced by the murders of civil rights workers across the South, Hollowell remained undaunted as he persevered as an activist and lawyer, investigating and litigating cases across the state. Alongside his insistence on fairness and dignity for his clients, he demanded the same for himself. For example, instead of being intimidated by the insults of a solicitor general in Southwest Georgia, Hollowell admonished the solicitor for his misbehavior. In a February 2, 1962, letter to the solicitor, Hollowell wrote,
The thing that compels me to write this letter is that it was my feeling that the attitude and conduct portrayed by you toward me as a visiting lawyer in your jurisdiction appeared to be beneath the dignity of the high office which you hold. As a matter of fact, it seemed calculated to prejudice the minds of those who might have been jurors in such case as I was engaged. . . .
Please understand that I do not write this letter with any malice toward you; for I would like to believe that had you thought carefully before you spoke, your reaction would not have been quite the same. It would be my hope, however, that there would be no similar recurrence.105
Louise Hollowell recalled his courage as he traveled across the state pursuing equal rights for his clients and himself.106 Hollowell likened the personal safety concerns in his civil rights work to his role as a soldier in the army. He said, “I was already trained as an army person. I was doing what I was disciplined to do.”107 No doubt his military training as a buffalo soldier and army officer as well as his service during World War II were essential in preparing him for his battle in civil rights.
While Hollowell was not reared in the South and had not witnessed racial violence as a child, he had first learned of racial brutality against blacks when he represented Lane College students at the SNYC. Inspired by meeting such bold and renowned civil rights advocates as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois at the conference, Hollowell not only changed his major but also committed his life to fight against racial injustice. He observed that to be able to meet and shake the hand of Robeson, the “passionate, charismatic, angry, impatient advocate for Negro rights stirred him in profound new ways” to embrace the cause of social justice.108
Hollowell often summed up his decision to pursue a path of fighting against racial injustice by referencing Paul Robeson’s valedictory address to Robeson’s own graduating class at Rutgers. Robeson declared: “We of the younger generation especially must feel a sacred call to that which lies before us. I go out to do my little part in helping my untutored brother. We of this less-favored race realize that our future lies chiefly in our own hands. On ourselves alone will depend the preservation of our liberties and the transmission of them in their integrity to those who will come after us.”109
By 1964—the year of the historic Civil Rights Act—Hollowell had been at the center of the struggle for over a decade and was beginning to wonder what new assignments he might receive. His new marching orders came in February 1966, when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him a regional director of the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The field of employment discrimination would become his next battleground, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act was his new weapon of choice.