University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 
 

"If the NAACP is not communist infiltrated, and I strongly believe it is, it is a perfect situation for the communists to use...They have men specially trained in knowing how to incite riots and cause other types of trouble. What better situation could they ask for than this?"

"Many students, parents, and Georgians feel hurt because our federal government...has shown us that it (fed. govern.) can force people to do things which we dislike...Perhaps in another hundred years integration would have come about voluntarily in the South but why must something we resent be crammed down our throats?"

An article in the fall issue of the Georgia Historical Quarterly offers the first in-depth exploration of the attitudes of white UGA students during the desegregation crisis of 1961, when Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes enrolled at UGA.

The student body made headlines during that crises when more than 1,000 students participated in a segregationist riot outside of Hunter's dormitory on Jan. 11. though similar riots occurred at the University of Alabama in 1956 and Ole Miss in 1962, historians have so far devoted little attention to the attitudes which fostered such violence.

"Consequently, to this day we know almost nothing about the racial ideas that prevailed among white students (or their teachers) at Southern campuses during the era of desegregation," says Robert Cohen, an adjunct professor of history.

Cohen examined essays written by 35 UGA students who were enrolled in a calculus class in January 1961. The professor, Thomas Brahana - president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors a prominent advocate of the reinstatement of Holmes and Hunter-filed the essays in the UGA archives, calling thema "peaceful demonstration of student opinion."

"This could be called a case study in ignorance," says Cohen. "Here is an example of what happens when you don't have multicultural education. These students are acting on fears and sterotypes."

Cohen's article is part of a larger project examining attitudes toward desegregation at UGA. He is also looking at letters written to the university and at editorial cartoons from around the country.

As an associate professor of social science education, Cohen is interested in how people learn - and unlearn-racism. The essays illustrate that the students formed their opinions about race from information passed along by family members, politicians and teachers.

The students demonstrate no awareness of research which had challenged the notion of white supremacy since the 1930s.

"If you dig below the headlines, you see a failure of our educational institutions," Cohen says. "The scholarship was there, but the students were not being exposed to it."

Only one student essay acknowledges "that the men of the white and black race have equal potential to accomplish intellectually... In conclusion, and I must admit that this is a statement that is quite hard to write, I believe that the only way the Negro will be able to climb up from the hole that we have thrown him in is by his being permitted to secure an education which is exactly that of the white men."

"Comments such as these suggest that though segregationism predominated, it was not universal among UGA students in 1961," Cohen writes.

"I don't have all the answers," Cohen says. "But it's clear that the university was not doing much to challenge the old ways of thinking about race. The purpose of this scholarship is to promote critical thought about race in ways that did not occur in 1961."