By Valarie Edwards
Michael Thurmond was just 10 years old, when Charlene Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became the first African American students to officially enroll at the University of Georgia.
At the height of this country's civil rights struggle, UGA administrators threatened to shut its doors rather than admit black students.
“I remember the sirens and the bombs. One distinct memory I have is that my mother would not allow us to go out in the evening and play. We had to stay home basically for weeks while this riot and the whole process was taking place.”
The year was 1961.
Decades later, while studying law at the University of South Carolina, Thurmond – now director of Georgia’s Department of Labor -- uncovered evidence that Hunter and Holmes may not have been the first African Americans to study at UGA.
In his book, “A Story Untold: Black Men and Women n Athens History,” Thurmond tells the story of Samuel Harris.
In the 1800s, decades before Brown versus Board of Education, when law and tradition forbade teaching African Americans, a trio of white professors secretly tutored Harris.
Thurmond says he found Harris’ story compelling.
“There were those in the white community who reached across the racial divide of strict segregation and saw something compelling and significant in this young man and rejected those same types of taboos and provided him with education and opportunity.”
Harris studied partly by sitting in the back of classes led by his tutors.
He was allowed to be there because his job was to run the stereopticon, a precursor to the modern movie projector.
His private tutoring lasted more than a year.
But when his professors petitioned school administrators for a degree on Harris’ behalf, they were turned away.
Now, a century later, four students are trying to get UGA officials to acknowledge Harris’ work.
For the past year, the team has met, sometimes five days a week, usually at seven in the morning before classes begin at UGA.
And, as senior Kellen Williams Singleton says, all the hours spent and the broken dates have been rough.
“There’s a lot of things that we’ve got to prove. 'Cause I have a friend and I actually talked to her about it, and she's white and she's like, wow, Kel, you not only trying to get a black man a degree, but you're trying to get a dead black man a degree.”
Jamarl Glenn is a junior at UGA and was one of the first to sign on join the project.
Glenn says it’s time for UGA to correct a century old wrong.
“When I first heard about, I realized this man he came to school here when blacks were not even admitted to Georgia public education. And for him to complete all the requirements and be up for his graduation from the board of trustees and be denied that diploma simply because he was black, to me it’s of course, an injustice.”
After being turned away from UGA, some of Athens’ leading white business owners paid for Harris to attend historically black Morris Brown College in Atlanta.
At a memorial following Harris’ death, a notation is made that Harris received his degree from Morris Brown in quote recognition of his work at the University of Georgia.
To get a degree for Samuel Harris, the team must first convince the faculty of the school’s philosophy department to accept their limited evidence of Harris’ work at UGA.
The four have spent countless hours sifting through old documents. What’s made the students’ job more difficult was a massive fire in the 1800s which destroyed most of UGA’s files.
However, old county records, show proof of Harris’ clandestine studies in Latin, English, chemistry and agriculture.
Steve Brown is the UGA archivist who is helping the students.
“This comes from the minutes of the Athens Board of Education. The key for us was this paragraph here …. S.F. Harris received his early education in the public schools of Athens and spent one year in the Atlanta University. He took one year under private teaching on the part of the members of the faculty of the University of Georgia.”
It would be much easier says junior Jamel Harvey to get an honorary degree for Harris.
But the team says Harvey wants Harris to have the real thing.
An honorary degree is simply not enough.
“It says a lot to get an honorary degree, but it doesn’t say anything about him being at UGA. Why settle for the easy route when we’ve already put in so much time, so much work and we’ve had so many people supporting us and the purpose is to show that he went to UGA. Why settle for the honorary, why not go for the posthumous?”
Samuel Harris is buried at Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery, not far from the campus of the University of Georgia.
Standing near his gravesite, senior Timothy Evans can just glimpse the buildings of UGA.
The school Evans says owes Samuel Harris his long overdue degree.
“This whole of idea of Samuel Harris and him being buried here and all of the other people here, represent a broken legacy. But, to a certain extent it's kind of disheartening to find that it took this long for him to be brought back up again.”
The four students … Timothy Evans, Jamarl Glenn, Kellen Williams Singleton And Jamel Harvey … all graduate from the University of Georgia within the next year.
Their goal is to get their own degrees, at the same time they pick up a degree for Samuel Harris.
