most big stories, this one involves money, power, and personalities. And to keep it moving, it also has football, sex, and fistfights.
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Chartered two years before the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to adopt the U.S. Constitution, the University of Georgia was the first college in America to be created by a state government. The concepts underpinning its charter—which established the school as the head of the state’s educational system—laid the foundation for public higher education in America. In 1784, at the urging of Governor Lyman Hall, the state set aside forty thousand acres to endow a university. The following year, Abraham Baldwin introduced legislation that passed in the General Assembly creating the university’s charter. Baldwin then served as the first president of the University of Georgia, during its planning phase from 1786 until it opened to students in 1801. (By then, North Carolina had followed Georgia’s lead and moved to a faster track in establishing a state-supported institution of higher learning, the University of North Carolina, which opened in 1795.)
Governor Hall and President Baldwin were both Yale-educated Connecticut Yankees; the architecture of their new campus in Athens was modeled on that of Yale, and the bulldog is the mascot for both schools. Baldwin and Hall shared a vision of the importance of education to a developing state and nation. Baldwin once said that Georgia must place its youth “under the forming hand of Society, that by instruction they may be moulded to the love of Virtue and good Order.” Two centuries later, it would be hard to overstate the importance of the University of Georgia to the people of the Peach State. The school motto, “To teach, to serve and to inquire into the nature of things,” spells out its broad mission. The oldest, largest, and most comprehensive educational institution in the state, the university’s first mission is to educate Georgia’s people. But it is also charged with improving the quality of life of all Georgians and discovering new knowledge through research. Though it has neither medical nor engineering schools, it has in most respects fulfilled that mission admirably.
The university has also carved its legacy deeply into Georgia’s political landscape. Alliances formed in its law and business schools have often been tempered and honed in the arenas of state government. Since 1851, UGA has educated twenty-five governors and countless state and local politicians. Luminaries of every political persuasion have advanced through the famous arches at Athens. Georgia’s current Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, and both of Georgia’s U.S. senators, Saxby Chambliss of Moultrie and Johnny Isakson of Marietta, are UGA graduates. Perdue, who hails from the town of Bonaire in central Georgia, is the fifth consecutive governor and seventh of the last nine to hold a degree from the University of Georgia. Other prominent graduates include Dan Amos, CEO of AFLAC; Robert Benham, the first African American chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court; Robert D. McTeer, former CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas; Charles S. Sanford Jr., former chairman/CEO of Banker’s Trust Company; Pete Correll Jr., retired CEO of Georgia-Pacific Corporation; retired Synovus CEO James Blanchard; Billy Payne, chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club; and the late humorist Lewis Grizzard, to name just a handful.
Yet Georgia was never an institution for the elite only. In its first two centuries—with one big exception—the university’s doors were open to just about anyone who could afford the modest tuition and board. Generations of Georgians from small towns and large cities alike followed one another to Athens, creating an interwoven tribe of alumni whose devotion to their alma mater almost needed to be experienced to be fully understood. It’s not uncommon today to hear a Georgian boast of being the third- or fourth-generation Georgia Bulldog in his or her family. This loyalty was partly by design: until 2002, so-called “legacy” admissions gave preferential treatment to applicants whose immediate family members had attended UGA. This policy no doubt contributed to the historical discrimination against blacks—the exception to the open admission philosophy noted above—and ended only after the school’s affirmative action program for African American students was struck down by the courts in 2001.
Like most Southern institutions, the University of Georgia struggled with the race issue. Although the original charter pledged that no citizen could be denied enrollment at the university because of religious affiliation, sex, or race, slaves were never considered citizens, even after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. And even after the end of the Civil War, African Americans were barred from the University of Georgia for another hundred years.
Race, of course, has been at the heart of some of Georgia’s greatest trials and triumphs. It boiled to the surface in 1941 when a University of Georgia secretary gave a sworn statement that the dean of the School of Education favored racial integration. Governor Eugene Talmadge, an avowed segregationist, demanded that the Board of Regents fire Dean Walter Cocking. To appease the governor, the Regents voted 8–4 to dismiss Cocking. However, the Regents reconsidered after President Harmon Caldwell threatened to resign in protest. At a special executive session two weeks later, the Regents reversed themselves and voted 8–7 to retain Cocking. The Regents’ action infuriated Talmadge, who snapped his galluses and demanded the resignations of three of his own appointees so he could pack the board with more subservient members. The three Regents refused to resign but two other members did quit and the Board was reconstituted more to the governor’s liking. The Regents then voted 10–5 to fire Cocking and also dismissed Marvin Pittman, the president of Georgia State Teachers College (now Georgia Southern University).
Both the Georgia university system and Talmadge would pay dearly. The Southern Association of Colleges and Universities met later that year and voted unanimously to strip most of Georgia’s public colleges of their accreditation. That stern action helped turn Georgia voters against the race-baiting Talmadge and his meddling in higher education. In 1942, voters instead elected as governor a progressive young legislator, Ellis Arnall, who promised to remove the university system from political interference.
Arnall—a Georgia law graduate—kept his promise. One of Governor Arnall’s first acts was to sign legislation creating a constitutionally independent Board of Regents, thus ending overt political interference in Georgia’s higher education system (although Georgia governors still appoint Regents and have retained considerable influence over the board).
The struggle to desegregate the University of Georgia began in earnest in 1950 when LaGrange native Horace Ward applied to attend law school. Ward had earned an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College and a master’s degree in political science from Atlanta University.
The Regents weren’t as supportive of a young black man as they had been of Dean Cocking. Responding to Ward’s application, the University System Board of Regents established new criteria for admission, including personal recommendations from UGA alumni. Ward sued, but (in one of the many ironies of the segregated South) before the case could be heard, he was called on to serve the country that considered him a second-class citizen. When Ward returned from military service, he renewed his lawsuit and the case was finally set for trial in December 1956. The judge then dismissed the case as moot because Ward had meanwhile enrolled at Northwestern University’s law school.
Ward was not finished with the University of Georgia, though. After graduating from Northwestern, he returned to Atlanta and soon joined famed civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell in representing Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, who had applied for admission to UGA in 1959 after graduating from the segregated Turner High School in Atlanta. Both were honor students, but university officials threw up roadblocks, claiming, among other excuses, that the dorms were full.
On January 6, 1961, U.S. District Judge William A. Bootle ruled that the pair were fully qualified to enter the university and “would already have been admitted had it not been for their race and color.” Three days later, on January 9, Hunter and Holmes were escorted to class as a crowd of white students chanted, “Two-four-six-eight. We don’t want to integrate.” There were
