From the Executive Director, October2019 GABJ, GSB Vol. 25, No. 2, Pg. 14

• Author: JEFF DAVIS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
• Position: Vol. 25 2 Pg. 14

From the Executive Director

Vol. 25 No. 2 Pg. 14

Georgia Bar Journal

October, 2019

Donald Lee Hollowell: Mr. Civil Rights

JEFF DAVIS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Among the dozen or so African-American lawyers in Atlanta in the 1950s, Donald Lee Hollowell was the most active in the effort to desegregate public institutions throughout Georgia.

During a volatile period of our state’s history, Hollowell courageously provided counsel to student activists during the Atlanta sit-ins, defended Martin Luther King Jr. and other demonstrators during the Albany Movement for civil rights and successfully litigated the landmark case integrating the University of Georgia. When President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to oversee the southeastern regional office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Hollowell became the first African-American regional director of a major federal agency.

According to his biography written by Edward A. Hatfield in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Hollowell was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1917. During Hollowell’s youth, his family moved regularly, usually in search of employment for his father, who worked primarily as a custodian and also took odd jobs to better provide for his wife and four children.

While his parents encouraged the Hollowell children to pursue a college education, the family had suffered financial distress during the Great Depression, and in 1935 his father informed him that he would have to suspend his studies to help support the family. After searching unsuccessfully for work, Hollowell enlisted in the Army and was assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the segregated 10th Calvary Regiment, better known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

During his military service, Hollowell encountered institutional and pervasive racism for the first time, being “relegated to eating in the kitchen, sleeping in quarters adjacent to prisoners and patronizing Jim Crow canteens”-an experience he later credited with inspiring his civil rights activism. Despite suffering those indignities, he performed admirably as an enlisted man, completing his high school education through correspondence classes and rising to the rank of private first class specialist five by 1938, when he withdrew from regular service to continue his education.

Hollowell then enrolled at Lane College, an all-black school in Jackson, Tennessee, where he excelled in the classroom and on the athletic...