The 1961 desegregation of the University of Georgia is considered one of the defining moments of civil rights history in the United States.

The struggle to open the state’s flagship school to all Georgia citizens began a decade earlier, when Horace Ward applied to UGA’s School of Law in 1950. Ward, a LaGrange native who had earned an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta and a master's degree in political science from Atlanta University, had reason to believe he stood a chance of being admitted. But UGA and the University System of Georgia Board of Regents responded to his application by establishing new law school admissions criteria: a battery of tests and the requirement of personal recommendations from alumni.

The moves effectively blocked Ward's entrance. UGA and the Board of Regents offered to pay his tuition at an out-of-state law school–a practice that was prevalent among Southern universities seeking to maintain segregation. Ward refused and spent the next several years fighting a legal battle to gain access to his home state's university.

Ward was represented in his discrimination suit by a team that included Atlanta civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell and Constance Baker-Motley of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Thirty days before his case was to be heard, Ward received notice that he had been drafted into the U.S. Army. After serving two years in the military, he returned to Georgia and renewed his lawsuit. The case finally went to trial in December 1956 but was dismissed when the judge ruled the issue moot upon learning that Ward had enrolled as a law student at Northwestern University. Thus the question of discrimination was never decided by the court.

After completing his law degree at Northwestern, Ward returned to Georgia and soon joined Hollowell and Motley in representing Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes in the lawsuit that ultimately led to the desegregation of UGA. They were further assisted by Vernon Jordan, a young Atlantan who had just graduated from Howard University Law School.

Holmes and Hunter seemed to possess all the requirements necessary for admission. Both had attended all-black Turner High School in Atlanta where Holmes had been valedictorian, senior class president, and co-captain of the football team. Hunter had finished third in her graduating class, had edited the school paper, and had been crowned Miss Turner.

Nevertheless, for a year and a half university officials gave a variety of reasons for denying their applications, including a statement that dormitories were full. While the legal battle was being waged, the two students started their college careers at other institutions: Holmes at Morehouse and Hunter at integrated Wayne State University in Detroit.

On January 6, 1961, federal judge William A. Bootle handed down his finding that "the two plaintiffs are fully qualified for immediate admission" and "would already have been admitted had it not been for their race and color." Hunter learned of the development when a New York reporter called her Wayne State dormitory. The story had been transmitted by the wire services and was immediately national news.

The presence of Holmes and Hunter on the UGA campus was a decisive test of segregation–and those on both sides of the issue knew it. On Monday, January 9, as the two students arrived on North Campus to register for classes, they were met by a crowd of reporters and fellow students, the latter chanting "Two-four-six-eight! We don’t want to integrate!"

Still, relative calm prevailed until the third evening after their arrival. After a basketball game in which UGA suffered a hotly contested loss to Georgia Tech, a mob of students descended on Myers Hall, where Hunter resided. The crowd hurled bricks and bottles before finally being dispersed by Athens police, who arrived with tear gas, and Dean of Men William Tate, who waded into the crowd demanding student IDs.

Later that night, Holmes and Hunter were escorted back to Atlanta by state troopers. They were informed by Dean of Students J. A. Williams that he was withdrawing them from UGA "in the interest of your personal safety and for the safety and welfare of more than 7,000 other students at the University of Georgia."

The riot and the suspension decision sparked an outcry in the University community, and more than 400 faculty members immediately signed a resolution calling for the return of Holmes and Hunter to campus. Within days, a new court order brought them back.

Meanwhile, state political leaders were having to do some legislative maneuvering to keep the state's flagship institution from being closed. In 1956, the Georgia General Assembly had passed a law forbidding coeducation of blacks and whites and cutting off state funds if schools were desegregated. Fortunately, the governor and key legislative leaders (all UGA alumni) decided that the school needed to remain open.

Holmes and Hunter were soon joined at UGA by another African American student, Mary Frances Early, who transferred from the University of Michigan, where she was in graduate school. Early, who made the move to provide moral support to Holmes and Hunter, earned her master’s degree in music education from UGA in 1962.

Holmes and Hunter graduated in 1963. Holmes received a bachelor of science degree cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to earn a medical degree from Emory University and to become an orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta, affiliated with Emory’s medical school and Grady Memorial Hospital. Hunter pursued a career in journalism, first with The New York Times, then with PBS and CNN.

Years passed before Holmes or Hunter returned to campus, but in 1979 Hunter came back to do a documentary on the evolution of race relations in Georgia since she had been a student. She visited again in 1981 to join the alumni advisory board of the journalism school and to meet Herschel Walker. In 1988, 25 years after her own graduation, she was asked to give UGA’s Commencement address.

Holmes, meanwhile, agreed in 1981 to be involved in planning the university’s bicentennial celebration. Two years later, he accepted an appointment as a trustee for the UGA Foundation. In conjunction with the bicentennial, the Holmes-Hunter lectureship was established in 1985, and each year thereafter Holmes attended the lecture series, always accompanied by family members. In 1992, Hunter (now Hunter-Gault) also returned for the lecture, delivered that year by Jesse Jackson. It was the last time the two appeared at UGA together. Holmes died in October 1995 at age 54. At his funeral, Hunter-Gault spoke movingly of their shared experience in desegregating the university, and, in a Washington Post column, remembered him as "one in a million."