When University of Georgia Student Government Association president Joshua Delaney graduates from college this spring, he won’t view it merely as a personal achievement.
Instead, the 21-year-old advertising and theater major will be thinking about how he stands on the shoulders of the two lone Black students who were the first to integrate the campus after winning a legal battle half a century ago.
“My UGA story started in 1961 when brother Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter-Gault came to this university,” Delaney said of the first Black students to integrate UGA.
“That was my beginning before I was even born,” said Delaney, who noted that being an African-American head of the student body at UGA like he is today was unimaginable 50 years ago.
“It’s something that you’re always cognizant of, you’re thankful for their courage and what they did,” Delaney continued in paying homage to Holmes and Hunter-Gault. “They could have at any time given up and said, ‘This isn’t for me.’ They didn’t do that. They did what was right.”
Such reflections have reverberated over the past few days at UGA as faculty, alumni, students and others celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the desegregation of UGA.
The civil rights milestone may not be as prominent in the public’s consciousness as, say, the Little Rock Nine—the name bestowed upon the students who integrated Little Rock Central High School under military guard following Brown v. Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 that desegregated public schools—but in many ways it is similarly significant.
