Hamilton Earl Holmes was the lesser-known member of the Black duo who helped to desegregate the University of Georgia in 1961. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 8, 1941, to businessman Alfred Holmes and schoolteacher Isabella Holmes. As a precocious, goal-oriented child, he looked up to his grandfather, Hamilton Mayo Holmes, a physician, as a role model. He graduated from Atlanta’s prestigious Henry McNeal Turner High School in 1959 as senior class president, class valedictorian, and co-captain of the school’s football team.
Holmes pushed fellow Turner High alumnus Charlayne Hunter (later Charlayne Hunter-Gault) and civil rights leader Jesse Hill to attend the University of Georgia (UGA), where scientific courses were superior to those at Georgia State University and Morehouse College. Thus, on January 9, 1961, after the legal battle to allow African Americans to enroll at UGA was ultimately won, Holmes and Hunter entered the campus to begin classes.
From raucous groups of white bystanders, they were met with jeers, racial slurs, and threats of violence. White students burnt crosses and hung a black effigy of “Hamilton Holmes” at the college entrance. After 600 white students rioted outside Charlayne Hunter’s dorm two days later, university officials were forced to transport the pair back to Atlanta with an armed state patrol escort, where they stayed for two days before returning to campus.
Holmes’ decision to live in an off-campus apartment reduced distractions and allowed him to excel academically. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies when he graduated from UGA in 1963, and he quickly became the first African American to be admitted to the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. In 1967, he received his medical degree from Emory and began his residency at Detroit General Hospital.
This was interrupted by military service as an Army ranger in Germany. Holmes went to Emory to complete his residency, and he was employed as an assistant professor of orthopedics there. He later became chief of orthopedics at Atlanta’s Veterans Administration hospital, established a private practice, served as medical director and chairman of orthopedic surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest hospital in the Southeast, and was a faculty member and associate dean at Emory University’s medical school.
It took years for Holmes to accept and forgive his early abuse at UGA. After originally declining the proposal, he joined the University of Georgia Foundation’s board of trustees in 1983. The Holmes-Hunter Lecture was established at UGA in 1985; in 1986, Holmes and Hunter were awarded the school’s 200th Anniversary Medal in recognition of their pioneering efforts; and in 1992, the Holmes-Hunter Scholarship for Black UGA students was established. On October 26, 1995, two weeks after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery, Holmes died at the age of 54 in his Atlanta home.
He was survived by his wife, Mary Vincent Holmes, his son, Hamilton E. Holmes Jr., a UGA graduate, and his daughter, Alison Holmes. To commemorate UGA’s 40th anniversary of desegregation, the Academic Building was renamed the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building in 2001.