Reporting Across the Color Line: A Retrospective on Calvin Trillin’s An Education in Georgia

When thinking of the University of Georgia’s desegregation, the fiftieth anniversary of which we mark this year, the writer Calvin Trillin’s name may not be among the first that comes to mind. Trillin is best known today as a humorist, Nation magazine’s “Deadline Poet,” food and travel author, and novelist. But Trillin began his career covering the South for Time magazine in the early 1960s, work that culminated in his New Yorker magazine articles (1963)—classics of civil rights reportage—on the challenge to the color line at the University of Georgia (UGA). These articles became the core of Trillin’s first book, An Education in Georgia: Charlayne Hunter, Hamilton Holmes, and the Integration of the University of Georgia (1964), a pathbreaking study exploring the dynamics and meaning of educational desegregation in the deep South.¹

As a Time reporter, Trillin covered the trial—Holmes v. Danner—that led to the federal court order desegregating UGA. He reported on the racist student protests that ended in an ugly riot outside Charlayne Hunter’s dormitory during the week that she and Hamilton Holmes became the first African American students on the Athens campus in January 1961. While his work for Time placed Trillin on the Georgia scene during these moments of high historical drama, the brief reports that Time’s editors ran about the desegregation crisis left Trillin dissatisfied. Hoping to dig beneath the headlines to explore how black Georgians had mounted this effort to topple Jim Crow, Trillin returned to Georgia in the spring of 1963, just before Holmes and Hunter graduated from UGA, to write their stories and assess how well integration had progressed.²

Though Trillin was a journalist covering a story, An Education in Georgia is more than merely a report; it is a pioneering venture in African American biography, social, educational, and oral history. It was the first book-length study of desegregation at a deep South university. Realizing that UGA’s desegregation struggle was born in black Atlanta, the hometown of Hunter and Holmes, Trillin devoted several chapters to a richly textured study of that community, spotlighting those who pushed the hardest for a test case to rid Georgia of its racially segregated educational system. Highlighting the importance of the black professional class in this community-based civil rights struggle, Trillin portrayed the young business leaders, lawyers, academics, and journalists active in the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action that, with the NAACP, launched the test case. Trillin effectively contextualized Hamilton Holmes’ activism, linking it to a family tradition of opposing Jim Crow that dated back to his grandfather, a physician and avid golfer who, along with Hamilton’s father and uncle, filed a suit in the 1950s that resulted in Atlanta’s first racially integrated golf course. Hamilton, was, as Trillin put it, a “third generation college graduate” and a “third generation integrationist” (p. 15). Trillin interviewed all these generations of Holmeses, and, in his hands, their political idealism and colorful personalities jump off the pages. Since no professional historian got around to studying UGA’s desegregation until decades later—when the older generations had passed on—Trillin’s oral histories remain definitive.³

Trillin was fascinated by the choice Holmes and Hunter made to cross the color line, giving up what could have been joyful college years—since their intellect and sociability would likely have made them popular figures on most campuses—to endure pariah status at UGA, which was 99 percent white and overwhelmingly segregationist.⁴ Trillin explored that choice, portraying Hunter and Holmes three dimensionally, as a biographer would, so they emerged as distinct individuals who adapted in their own ways to the difficult UGA environment and political celebrity. He showed that each paid a price for the role of civil rights pioneer. The studious Hamilton remained almost friendless at UGA and...