Professor Robert Pratt believes that while UGA's desegregation is usually a minor footnote in civil rights histories - and considered less turbulent than integration at other southern schools - the process was more violent than is generally acknowledged.
In his new book ``We Shall Not Be Moved,'' published by UGA Press this summer, Pratt argues that the problems went beyond the brick-throwing and fires that marked the most troubled day of integrating the campus.
Pratt believes that state officials and top UGA students might have conspired to try to discourage the school's first two black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, from remaining enrolled at the flagship university.
``What's surprising in Georgia is the level of conspiracy and complicity between lawmakers and some of the students who felt they could act with impunity,'' Pratt said. ``They had a clear objective in mind. They had done their homework.''
Relying on eyewitness accounts and archival materials, Pratt's reconstruction concludes that the riot outside Hunter's Myers Hall dorm room after a Jan. 11 basketball game against Georgia Tech was not a spontaneous disturbance.
Nor was it a small incident, according to Pratt, who details how students charged the dormitory to try to gain entry and surrounded a terrified television cameraman to keep him from filming the riot, which drew up to 2,000 people.
``For many years university officials downplayed the significance,'' Pratt said. ``It's surprising how attitudes can be shaped by misinformation. Clearly people were in denial at the time....It was no disturbance - it was a nasty riot. It's no longer believable to maintain that the governor's office did not know.''
Records and interviews suggest members of the prestigious Demosthenian Literary Society worked with law students to organize the riot, hoping to give officials grounds for suspending Hunter and Holmes for their own safety, Pratt said.
The professor said students knew that scenario had already led to Autherine Lucy's dismissal from the University of Alabama and preceded a long delay in the Tuscaloosa school's integration.
Estimating the reach of a conspiracy was elusive, Pratt said. Demosthenian minutes from December 1960 and January 1961 are missing from a secretarial record that he said reveals the group to have been a ``notorious racist organization.''
A school archivist disputed Pratt's conclusion about the debate society, which is one of the nation's oldest.
``Certainly you could find your extreme racist points of view,'' but other ``timid voices'' in the group spoke out in opposition, said Gilbert Head, a former president of the Demosthenians. ``I don't think there's a smoking gun there.''
Pratt's book also suggests there was an attempt to frame Holmes by sending a white woman to seduce him. Pratt also analyzes a possible delay in sending state troopers to quell the Jan. 11 riot.
``We Shall Not Be Moved'' is among several books and papers the school has published to mark the 40th anniversary of desegregation. Pratt will present a lecture on his book when classes resume in the fall.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/7/192507