It took more than a year and a half to get the University of Georgia to accept two black applicants. It took less than a week to suspend those same applicants from the school that they had worked so hard to attend.
Luckily for Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, the courts made sure that the suspension (that was administered “for their own safety”) did not last long. A new court order swiftly brought them back onto campus, where they would leave their mark on the university and their individual colleges for years to come.
Hunter graduated third in her class at Turner High School and showed promise as a journalist early on while serving as the editor of the high school newspaper. Initially she spent the first year and a half of her college career at Wayne University in Detroit, lying in wait until UGA granted her admission.
She applied to UGA, specifically to study journalism at the Grady College. “We are very fortunate that she wanted to come here,” said Dr. E. Culpepper Clark, current dean of Grady. “Journalism cannot be practiced in an undemocratic society,” and the desegregation of the University with the admittance of Hunter into Grady was a form of “liberation for journalism.”
Currently, according to Clark, Grady is “very active in the promotion of diversity and is willing to do all it can do to increase diversity.” The numbers agree with him. Since the fall of 2005 the number of minority students enrolled in the Grady college has risen from 10 to 14 percent,
In addition to racial and cultural diversity, Grady still faces challenges with attracting a demographic that they have always been fighting for: males. Clark said that “more [males] need to be attracted to Grady degrees,” and admitted that they “have not succeeded in making it as attractive as it should be to guys.”
As Grady continues to grow and evolve, Clark has hopes that it “remains committed to democracy, civic virtue, and is engaging as it is today on a new frontier.”
Hamilton Holmes was the valedictorian of Turner High School and graduated the same year as Hunter. He, like Hunter, also came to the UGA as a transfer student, only he initially attended Morehouse College in Atlanta. Holmes would later go on to be the first black medical student admitted to Emory University, but not before leaving his mark in the Franklin College.
Holmes had wanted to be a doctor since he was a young child and has a long line of integrationists in his family, so being the first black male student at the University of Georgia held a lot of appeal for him.
It is “very significant” for Franklin that Holmes decided to come to Franklin at the University of Georgia, said Dr. Kecia Thomas, Senior Advisor to the Dean of Franklin.
It is also very fitting since Franklin is the “college that attracts the most racial diversity” in regards to its students. As of 2010, Franklin boasts a minority population of 23 percent.
Franklin currently has an office solely devoted to diversity as well as a program that Thomas heads up called RED. RED stands for Research and Engagement in Diversity and was launched in the fall of 2005. Thomas said that the ultimate goal of this program is to “promote value for diversity-based scholarship in college.” RED has a grant program for graduate students as well as an outreach program that sponsors community improvement projects throughout Athens and the surrounding areas
Thomas hopes that Franklin will continue to “lead the university” and provide “greater outreach to the state community” in the years to come.
The University of Georgia and its colleges have come a long way since Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were brave enough to fight for their education. Just in the last ten years, UGA has increased its percentage of minority students from 13 percent in the fall of 2000 to 21 percent in the fall of 2010.
With a total population of 33,660, the aforementioned 21 percent comes out to more than 7,000 students who would not have been admitted to the university if it were not for Hunter, Holmes, and all the others who gave their effort to the desegregation of UGA.
Sources:
“An Education in Georgia” by Calvin Trillin
The University of Georgia Office of Institutional Research FACTS database
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