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Saturday, January 15, 2011

50 Years Since Integration At The University Of Georgia | The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog

50 Years Since Integration At The University Of Georgia | The Defenders Online | A Civil Rights Blog

50 Years Since Integration At The University Of Georgia

By The Editors

On January 6, 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became the first African Americans to enroll at the University of Georgia, one of the significant milestones on the road to the climactic civil rights victories of the mid-1960s. One member of the brilliant legal team that had secured the judicial rulings desegregating the university was a newly-minted graduate of Howard University Law School, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. Like Hunter and Holmes, Jordan had grown up and gone to high school in Atlanta. One of his duties during the legal wrangling that preceded their admission was to escort Hunter through the hostile, often howling mobs of students who tracked their movements on campus. Hamilton E. Holmes went on to become a highly-respected orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta and member of the faculty at Emory University. He died of