Donald L. Hollowell - Tales of Awesomeness

When we think of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, we normally think of luminaries such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Andrew Young, and Rosa Parks. But have you heard of Donald L. Hollowell? It’s not a name that is famous in this early part of the 20th century, but in the 1950s and 1960s, during the thick of the fight for equal rights, his name often meant the difference between victory in the courts, or justice denied.

Donald Lee Hollowell was born on December 19, 1917 in Wichita, Kansas. In his early years, his family moved around a lot while his father looked for work to support his family, and Hollowell had to leave high school during the Great Depression to help find work. To do this he joined the US Army where he excelled and rose to the rank of Private First Class Specialist Five in the Army’s Tenth Cavalry Regiment, the famous Buffalo Soldiers.

Growing up around the Midwest, Hollowell had seen discrimination for sure, but nothing like the institutionalized racism he found in the Army, and the intense Jim Crow restrictions he faced in the South. In one of Hollowell’s recollections, he tells of how the “army officials relegated him to eating in the kitchen, sleeping in quarters adjacent to prisoners, and patronizing Jim Crow canteens.” His experiences with segregation and discrimination during his time in the Army started a fire in him, and his subsequent involvement with the Southern Negro Youth Conference after the war inspired him to pursue the study of law to help in the fight for social justice.

While in the Army he completed his high school education through correspondence courses, and after he left in 1938, he entered Lane College, an all-Black school in Jackson, Tennessee. There he excelled in the classroom, was a three-sport athlete, the editor of the school newspaper, as well as class president for two years in a row. In 1941, he was recalled to active duty and was stationed at Fort Benning, Ga, where he met his future wife, Louise. He later served in Europe and rose to the rank of Captain.

After the war, he went back to Lane, completed his degree with a magna cum laude, and then went on to Loyola University in Chicago where he received his law degree in 1951. He later went back to Atlanta where he rejoined his wife, who was in graduate school at Atlanta University (later called Clark Atlanta University). She would later go on to become a professor at Morris Brown College.

In Atlanta, Hollowell quickly established himself as a gifted attorney and began to play a major role in the burgeoning civil rights struggle. As the struggle started to gain momentum in the South, he found himself at the center of much of the legal drama, when many high-profile plaintiffs sought out his aid to press their cases.

He first started to garner statewide attention when he became the chief counsel to Horace Ward in 1956 in the Ward vs Regents case. This case pit Horace T. Ward, a black applicant against the University Of Georgia School Of Law that sought to deny him entry. Although the case was ultimately dismissed, it brought Hollowell into the spotlight. He later earned a decisive legal victory against state-sanctioned segregation in higher education in 1959, when he successfully represented three applicants denied admission to Georgia State University. He successfully argued that the school’s admission policies were unconstitutional, paving the way for more fights in the future. He also became the attorney that argued for Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter in the landmark case (Holmes v. Danner) against the University of Georgia when they were denied admission into their undergraduate school. UGA was (and still is) Georgia’s flagship institution of higher learning and this case brought a great deal of attention to the cause of educational desegregation, and for Hollowell. Even though the school argued that the denials were not due to race but to a variety of procedural explanations, Hollowell, with the help of a cadre of NAACP attorneys, systematically broke down the school’s argument and ultimately lead to the opening of the doors of the University of Georgia to black students in 1961.

Hollowell became famous for his measured, calm, imperturbable style. At a time in Georgia (and the rest of the South) when court audiences were still segregated by color – whites on the ground level, blacks in the hot balcony, and “talking back” to a white person by a black person could end up with the black person getting lynched, Hollowell used the power of the position given to him as an attorney to not only speak to a white person, but get that person to speak back to him with respect. He may not have won all of his cases, but he, one of the very few lawyers in the whole country that worked on civil rights cases and a black lawyer on top of that, gave the black communities that he represented a voice and hope. He was, in some circles, being called “Mr. Civil Rights”.

There is a wonderful episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Revisionist History” called “Mr. Hollowell Didn’t Like That” (episode 8, season 2) that you need to listen to. It recounts Vernon Jordan’s recollections of Hollowell – Vernon Jordan himself being a civil rights fighter and icon. Hollowell served as a mentor to Jordan and a slew of young African-American lawyers, always in command of the situation and always calm, cool, collected. He led them through many cases where victory was not assured and often wasn’t produced, but nonetheless shepherded them with courage and conviction such that the newer generation of social justice wouldn’t lose hope. Gladwell does a great job of telling the story of Hollowell’s life and his effect on the civil rights struggle. One story stands out in my mind – it’s the story of how Hollowell “rescued” MLK Jr. after he was arrested for the Atlanta lunch counter sit-ins.

The story goes something like this: In 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. participated in a series of sit-ins in Atlanta and was arrested. Previously MLK had been arrested for a traffic violation – for not changing his driver’s license from Alabama to Georgia in the required 90 days – and was sentenced to a public works camp, aka. a chain gang. He had gotten that sentence suspended and was on probation, which meant that this second arrest for the sit-in would be the perfect excuse for Georgia officials to cart off one of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the time to a chain gang and make him disappear and out of their hair for the duration.

Hollowell was actually serving as legal counsel to the students in the sit-in, so he went to get King out. But when he arrived at the county jail, he learned that King had been moved to the Reidsville state prison early that morning without any notice. Reidsville was a notorious prison at the time, and many actually feared for King’s safety. It was the kind of prison that made you think of “Cool Hand Luke” and people on chain gangs often had “accidents”. Hollowell drove 300 miles, bringing with him the national media, to the footsteps of the prison, walked in, and walked out with his client. There was a media frenzy and the world was watching, and although much of the attention was on Dr. King himself, Donald Hollowell was right beside him, calm and implacable.

Hollowell would go on to become the regional director of the Equal Opportunities Commission, being appointed to that position by LBJ in 1966. It made him the first black regional director orf a major federal agency and he would hold the post for almost the next 2 decades. From the 70s to the mid-80s he would lead the Commission as the chairman of the board and led the Voter Education Project in Georgia, nearly doubling the number of registered Africa-American voters in that time.

It’s historically ironic and cosmically karmic that in 2002 the University of Georgia would award Donald L. Hollowell an honorary Doctor of Laws for his brilliance, dedication and contributions to social justice. Later, both UGA and Emory University would create professorships in his honor. And of course, he has won the gratitude of countless individuals, organizations, and institutions such as the NAACP, Council of Human Relations, ACLU, and universities and law schools the nation over.

So what is the legacy of Donald L. Hollowell? At a time when an entire oppressed community could hardly imagine a different future, he gave them hope. He showed them that it was possible, however slow and difficult it may be, to change the system. He also showed others how to fight the system, to change it and make it better. Over the course of his career, he mentored a number of younger attorneys and civil rights activists, including Ward, Jordan, Marvin Arrington, and Lonnie King. Jordan later called Hollowell “a friend, mentor, boss, idol, and role model.” He was a true Hero of Awesomeness.