Deja Vu

From The New Yorker - 

Taunts, Tear Gas, and Other College Memories

BY CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT

Hearing about the indignities faced by students of color at the University of Missouri, I am taken back fifty-four years, to when Hamilton Holmes and I entered, and then matriculated, at the University of Georgia as its first two black students.

Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes leave an administrative building at the University of Georgia in 1961.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY AP

The initial response of many white students to our presence was overtly racist. One night, students and others gathered outside my dormitory and shouted, “Nigger go home.” The town police threw around tear gas, ostensibly to disperse an already-thinning crowd. By the time the state troopers arrived, the protesters were long gone. The university suspended me for, they said, my own safety. (Hamilton, who lived with a black family a few blocks away, was also suspended.) As I left the dorm that night, a group of girls who had been told to change their sheets, so as not to be affected by the tear gas, formed a semi-circle, and one threw a quarter at me and yelled, “Here, Charlayne, go and change my sheets.” Although “nigger” was their preferred shout-out, the students would also use other words they thought would be hurtful. They didn’t realize they were complimenting me when they yelled out “Freedom Rider.” And there were other, nonverbal incidents. Both Hamilton and I had our car tires flattened from time to time, and on at least one occasion the side of my little white Ford Falcon became a maze of knife scratches.

The first semester was the worst, and things died down after that. But what we might today call “microaggresions” were still evident: The time I went to see if I could work on the school newspaper and was welcomed by the editor, but never got an assignment. Or when professors went a whole term without addressing me in class. I never reacted to any of this publicly, but I spent a lot of time, especially early on, in the university infirmary with mysterious stomach pains. My one visitor was Hamilton, who was finding it difficult to make friends. Despite all the stress, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and went on to enroll as the first black student at Emory University School of Medicine. He became an orthopedic surgeon and, at one time, the medical director of Grady Memorial Hospital, the gargantuan public hospital in Atlanta. In 1995, he died, at the age of fifty-four. I read that they thought it was heart failure. Now that I know about P.T.S.D., and as I cope with my own post-college problems with claustrophobia, I wonder if that didn’t have something to do with it.

I still tear up when I speak of Hamilton, but have been comforted by the fact that the doors that were shut for so long to black students are now open. To be sure, many have come after me and are thriving, including on the football field where Hamilton was not allowed to play, despite his love of the game, because, so the argument went, either his teammates or the opposing team would try to hurt, if not kill, him. Today, the Georgia Bulldogs are a powerful force, impressive as teammates who accept each other for their prowess rather than for their color. As a team they send a powerful message, as do the football players at Missouri, who understood how to use their power off as well as on the field. But as I read this week the stories of young people at Missouri, I am struck by an awful déjà vu. My stomach hurts again, and this time the origin is not so mysterious.

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