The struggle for integration

   Fifty years ago, black students won the battle. But the war had just begun.

   When Dr. Harold Black began his freshman year in the fall of 1962, he was the only male black student living on campus. It had been over a year since the admission of Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes marked the beginning of desegregation, but the university Black entered was far from desegregated.

   “No one sat on the same row as I sat on for the first two years on campus,” said Black. When he tried to eat at a dining hall, he was turned away because they didn’t believe he was a student. When he tried to go swimming in the university pool, they closed the pool and drained it. The bookstore refused to sell him textbooks until Dean Tate intervened.

   In 1966, four years after Black’s admission, Kenneth Dious transferred to the University of Georgia from Savannah State University, a historically black college. Despite the fact that black students had been a part of UGA’s campus since 1961, Dious had to bring in “muscle from a white attorney” to gain admission. “I had all A’s at Savannah State,” said Dious. “The university never sent my admission papers. I finally got them in late August. By then I didn’t think I would be going at all.”

   For Dious and the handful of other black students who joined him on campus his sophomore year (a group known as the “magnificent seven,”) the fight didn’t end at desegregation. A self-proclaimed “rabble-rouser,” Dious and the magnificent seven forced the university toward integration.

   In the fight for integration, the magnificent seven’s main opponent was the university administration, not the students. “You had two types of white students,” said Dious. “Those who were interested in you and those who were disinterested. I would give 95% of the UGA student body a ‘B’ in regard to attitude. It was the administration we had problems with. They were afraid of change.”

   Dious fed off of the change that the administration feared. An Athens native, Dious participated in the civil rights movement before he began his career at UGA. “I was a marcher,” said Dious. “I marched and fought against the Ku Klux Klan. So I would give it to you. I wasn’t afraid. I had been out there with the KKK, nothing the University of Georgia was going to do would scare me.”

   One day while Dious and his friends were playing cards in the Bulldog room, a gathering place for students on campus, they noticed that the university had segregated restrooms for employees. “We stopped the serving line and said nobody was going to come through the line until they took those signs down,” he said. A fight broke out when a football player decided he was going through the line anyway. Thirty minutes later, the university police arrived. The next day, the signs were removed.

   In addition to taking a stand against remaining signs of segregation, black students scheduled regular meetings with university president Frederick Davison to discuss certain demands on the university, like more black faculty and black athletes. Davidson responded to their demands and even printed them in the 1970 Pandora yearbook.

   During football games, they refused to stand for the national anthem until the university stopped playing “Dixie,” a song widely associated with the Confederacy.

   When UGA played the University of Houston in football, they made a sign that read “Houston defeats Georgia with black power” because there were black players on Houston’s team. When they weren’t allowed to take the sign into the stadium, Dious suggested throwing the sign over the fence. When they unveiled the sign in the stands, a fight broke out.

   Dious also forced integration socially. “Sometimes I would go into a fraternity house because they had the professor’s old exams. I figured if they had them, I wanted them too,” he said. “That was my mentality.”

   In the spring of 1967, Dious decided to try out for the football team. He only played one game, the spring exhibition game, because of travel limitations the team would have faced had he been a full season player. But a step toward integration was taken when his mother and former football coach came to see him play. “I think they were the first African Americans to seat themselves in a game in the regular section. Before then, African Americans had to sit over near the railroad tracks,” said Dious. “From there it started breaking down more and more. My junior and senior years, we sat in the student section. So that broke up segregation some.”

   Of the magnificent seven, Dious says that all but one have visited Athens since their graduation. “She had such a bad experience that she would not come back,” he said. While Dious himself is a half-hearted Georgia fan at best, the struggle for integration proved worthy of the consequences. “I was determined when I went to Georgia that they weren’t going to steal my youth, they weren’t going to make this a miserable experience for me,” he said. “I wasn’t going to be able to say, when retelling my story, that I allowed someone to take my youth while I sat on the corner and cried. I just wasn’t going to do that. And I just didn’t do that.”