The day after Valentine’s Day, I was invited to give a lecture to a crowd of high-school and university students, and also faculty and administrators, at the University of Georgia. Fifty-six years ago, amid nasty, racist resistance, Hamilton Holmes and I became the first two students to desegregate the school. The audience also included several of our peers: white men and women who, as students in the early sixties, put their bodies on the line and went to jail for what they called “freedom, justice, and equality” in Atlanta, a city where many stores took money from black students but refused to offer them access to their restrooms or to seat them in their restaurants. Those activist students called themselves the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights.
I told the audience that I wanted to share my experience in that moment in our history as a way of encouraging students to get politically involved, no matter their age. To challenge them to keep America true to its promise of equality. Without such sacrifice, the country would not be the place that it is today.
The surviving members of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights are now, of course, older, some physically challenged—and gray, like me. Carolyn Long is one of them. During the lecture, which she attended, I read from an old interview that I did with her many years ago for a book I was writing about the student protests. To try to expose the lie of “separate but equal,” the students launched a “jail without bail” campaign, in an effort to get arrested, so that they could challenge the law in court. Carolyn told me, “We were placed in a big, open cell with murderers, prostitutes, hardened criminals. There were not enough beds, and what beds there were were cold, steel slabs. It was cold, so we slept in our clothes. We had dressed up for the demonstrations, so at first the only shoes we had on were the high heels we wore when we were arrested. So we walked around [barefoot] on that cold, tile floor.” Carolyn was nineteen when she was first arrested, and she continues to work as an advocate for racial equality.
I didn’t want to jeopardize my situation as a student at the university by joining in the demonstrations, but there were other ways to participate in the movement and confront injustice. I volunteered to write for the university’s newspaper, the Red & Black, but never got an assignment. It was not because the editor, Tom Johnson—who, many years later, went on to head CNN—was racist. It was because Athens, home to the University of Georgia’s main campus, itself was still segregated, and many of the stories that the newspaper covered were based in town. But I refused to accept the situation. Instead, I travelled on weekends to Atlanta to work as a reporter for the Atlanta Inquirer, a small paper that was founded by African-Americans to cover the local civil-rights movement. I interviewed the “jail without bail” students after their arrests and submitted their stories to Julian Bond, the paper’s managing editor and one of the authors of the Committee’s manifesto, who later became an outspoken champion of civil rights in Congress and chair of the N.A.A.C.P. This was the beginning of my life as a journalist.
As I looked out at the crowd during my lecture, I was proud to be surrounded by black, white, Latino, and Asian students, an image that Hamilton never knew. He died at the age of fifty-four, and I can’t help but think that the stress of all we went through contributed to his untimely passing. He had been a football star at Turner High School, in Atlanta, and wanted so badly to play with the U.G.A. Bulldogs after our admission. He was denied the chance to join the team on the grounds that, if his white teammates didn’t hurt him on the field, players from other, still-segregated schools would. It was a devastating blow, but Hamp concentrated on his studies. He graduated, went to Emory University—as that institution’s first black medical student—and became an orthopedic surgeon.
A few nights after the lecture, in another state, I attended a “Black Panther” première with Don Harris, a retired businessman who was a civil-rights activist in the South in the sixties. Before the movie began, we talked about the news of the day: the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the subsequent plan, by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, to march on government offices and demand commonsense gun-control laws that could prevent another slaughter.
My friend is as gray as those who travelled to Athens* for the lecture. In our conversation, he said he was sad about the murders but also encouraged by what he was hearing of the plans of students, from Florida and other parts of the country, to head to Washington and make their demands for better gun restrictions heard. “That’s how it started for us—it was students, from all across the South,” he said. “And look what we achieved.” We were teen-agers when we took on the racist Jim Crow laws of the South. Some adults were afraid for us, and some didn’t agree with our protests, but we all felt the sting of segregation. Such history holds lessons for the young people who are marching and standing up today. As Don sat down in the dark, and as the previews began to roll, he whispered to me, “It’s now their time. And, given our history, I am hopeful they will succeed.”
*A previous version of this post misstated the location of the lecture.
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