Virgil Hawkins and the Long Wait

In April of nineteen forty-nine, Virgil Darnell Hawkins walked into the University of Florida and applied to the College of Law. He was a forty-two-year-old Black man, a veteran of community organizing, a man who had already attended several colleges without being able to finish a degree. The university denied him admission on the basis of race.

Hawkins and five other Black applicants filed a lawsuit with the NAACP. What followed was one of the longest civil rights legal battles in Florida history.

The case went to the Florida Supreme Court three times. It went to the United States Supreme Court twice. After the landmark Brown versus Board of Education decision in nineteen fifty-four declared school segregation unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court ordered Florida to admit Hawkins immediately. The Florida Supreme Court refused. State officials stalled, reinterpreted, delayed. The constitutional order of the nation's highest court sat unenforced.

What the record cannot fully account for is what nine years of fighting the system cost Hawkins personally. The files show hearings and rulings. They do not show that.

In nineteen fifty-eight, Hawkins withdrew his own application, accepting a consent decree in exchange for a commitment that the University of Florida would open its graduate and professional schools to Black students broadly. On September fifteenth of that year, George Starke became the first African American to register at the University of Florida College of Law. Hawkins had opened the door and stepped aside so that others could walk through it.

Virgil Hawkins eventually received his law degree from a different school, at age sixty-eight. The UF law school bears his name on a civil rights clinical program today, a belated acknowledgment that what was done to him was wrong.