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 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. Although desegregation had already taken place, 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.”
Dious and the handful of other black students who joined him on campus (a group he called the “magnificent seven”) didn’t have the problems gaining access to the university dining hall or bookstore that Black experienced. But the new generation of black students wasn’t satisfied with simple desegregation. A self-proclaimed “rabble-rouser,” Dious and the other black students forced the university toward integration.
Starring in the fight against integration was not the student body, but the university administration. “I would give 95 percent of the UGA student body a ‘B’ in regard to attitude,” said Dious. “It was the administration we had problems with. They were afraid of change.”
Dious fed off of the change that the administration feared. He credits his participation in the civil rights movement with giving him the courage to confront the administration. “I marched and fought against the Ku Klux Klan,” said Dious. “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 addressing 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, including 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.
For a football game against the University of Houston, they constructed a sign that read “Houston defeats Georgia with black power” because there were black players on Houston’s team. They weren’t allowed to take the sign into the stadium, so they threw it over the fence. When the sign was unveiled in the stands, a fight broke out.
In the spring of 1967, Dious tried out for the football team. Despite comments from fellow players stating that he should have been in the starting lineup, he only played in the spring exhibition game because no hotel would house a black athlete, which would have complicated travel to away games.
But the spring game was all it took. 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.”
As black students spread across the stands, integration spread across campus. Thanks to the efforts of Black, Dious and the magnificent seven, Phillip Jackson had easy access to the dining hall when he began his freshman year in 1971. He could buy books from the bookstore. He could sit anywhere he pleased at a football game. He had close white friends. But what he didn’t have was a feeling of acceptance. “People would sit and debate integration and affirmative action and it was almost like I wasn’t supposed to be there,” said Jackson. “I didn’t feel welcome socially. I didn’t feel like part of the school.”
Still, by the time Jackson graduated in 1975, noticeable progress had been made. “People took more pride in the school,” he said. “I guess the whites seemed to accept us a lot more. We weren’t that unique.”
Integration continued and signs of a segregated campus faded, but scars remained. Dious knows of at least one black alumna who has not visited Athens since she graduated. “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 fight 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.”
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