Saving the Soul of Georgia: Donald L. Hollowell and the Struggle for Civil Rights

TWO: A Legal Education: Addressing the “Just Grievances” of Negroes in America

As Hollowell and other blacks fought in World War II to help win freedom abroad, blacks were emboldened to fight for racial justice in the United States. The naacp in tandem with state and local branches orchestrated protests against state-sanctioned Jim Crow practices, targeting mob violence, racial exclusion in education and employment, and the white primary. Local people, tired of racial injustice, also initiated challenges to the social order of their own accord. Texas resident Lonnie Smith and Georgia resident Primus King were local activists whose protests had a major impact on helping to dismantle white supremacy. Smith, a dentist in Harris County, Texas, and King, a barber and itinerant preacher from Columbus, Georgia, sought to vote in their respective states during the war years. On July 27, 1940, Smith attempted to obtain a ballot in the Texas all-white Democratic primary. The state Democratic Party refused to allow Smith to vote. With the help of Texas branches of the naacp and the national office, Smith filed the historic Smith v. Allwright case. Texas officials vigorously defended the all-white primary, arguing that the Democratic Party was a private entity entitled to determine its membership and exclude blacks from participating in primary [ C h a p t e r T w o A Legal Education Addressing the “Just Grievances” of Negroes in America 24 ] chapter two elections. By 1944, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where ldf attorneys Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie won a unanimous decision on April 3 that nullified the Texas all-white primary system. Despite U.S. Supreme Court rulings, segregationists outside the district or state in which a case was filed or appealed often refused to comply with court orders. This was true in the Smith ruling. Although the court had outlawed the white primary, Georgia officials refused to end the practice. Shortly after the Smith decision, on July 4, 1944, Primus King entered the courthouse in Muscogee County, Georgia, seeking to vote in the Democratic primary. Voting officials advised King that because of his race, he was not qualified to be a member of the Democratic Party of the State of Georgia, and they subsequently refused to allow King to vote. Reminiscent of Smith, and aided by the state naacp, Thurgood Marshall, and the ldf, King challenged the all-white Democratic primary in Columbus, Georgia. He won a 1945 victory in federal court that declared the racial exclusion of blacks from voting in primaries unconstitutional. Smith’s and King’s accomplishments exemplified the kinds of individual acts of courage that were on the rise in southern communities and which, with the help of the ldf, resulted in legal victories. Yet it would take many such acts of courage and massive resistance to undermine the segregationist system. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court victory and the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing blacks the right to vote, voter registration boards, especially in the Deep South, used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other impediments to deny blacks voting rights, practices that persisted until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Within this broader context, Hollowell returned to Lane College in 1946 and continued his ascendancy as a student leader, which had begun before his World War II service. He continued to succeed academically and remained actively engaged in extracurricular activities. Foreshadowing his robust schedule as a civil rights activist and lawyer, Hollowell not only served as president of his Lane College classes, edited the college newspaper, and excelled in athletic endeavors but also was active in promoting student activities, including the Colored Methodist Episcopal Sunday School group and ymca work. During his junior year, members of the student body chose him as a delegate to the ymca convention in Atlanta, and his fraternity elected him to serve as a delegate to the fraternity’s national convention in Nashville, Tennessee. Hollowell was a popular student whose peers regarded him as a leader, repeatedly electing him to leadership positions and choosing him to represent a legal education [ 25 the student body at various regional and national meetings. He was elected president of the student council, a position that allowed him to represent the student body at the Southern Negro Youth Congress (snyc) convention. In October 1946, only a few months after his return to Lane, Hollowell traveled to the campus of predominantly black Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, to attend the national convention of...