Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::January 27, 2003

Worth repeating

Horace T. Ward, Senior U.S. District Court Judge, delivered this year’s Holmes-Hunter Lecture, the 18th in the annual series, on Jan. 21. Ward was the first African American to seek admission to the University of Georgia when he applied to the School of Law in 1950. When he finally received his law degree elsewhere, he returned to Georgia, where he served as one of the attorneys in the case which resulted in Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter being admitted to UGA.
Some excerpts from the lecture:
“Now, in choosing a topic for this talk today, I entitled it ‘Unlikely Heroes of the Desegregation Struggle.’ When you consider the struggle for equal rights in the United States, particularly in the South, you must consider three groups of persons as principal participants: plaintiffs, lawyers and judges.
“In order to have a case in court there must be plaintiffs willing to step forward and file a lawsuit. In those days, the days I’m talking about--the forties, fifties and sixties--plaintiffs with courage and dedication were needed, because they might have been subject to serious harassment, such as the loss of jobs and the like. In this role we have seen the likes of Charlayne Hunter, Hamilton Holmes and James Meredith . . . and several younger students and their parents. . . . Two groups of persons challenged this degrading system from a legal perspective: lawyers and judges. Over a long period of time, courageous lawyers representing courageous plaintiffs filed lawsuits in the federal courts under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. . . . Thurgood Marshall is the best-known of this group. . . .”

--Beth Roberts

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