Myra Payne Elliott isn’t feeling well. Getting out of bed takes more energy than she has most days, and the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) makes it hard to breathe. You wouldn't know it to look at her, though, immaculately dressed in a beaded silver gown and matching jacket, her white hair carefully pulled into a bun and secured with a silver pin in the shape of a butterfly. There have been reporters and photographers at the door. Last week, it was a documentary film crew. Now, she's being honored with a special lecture at Georgia State.
Elliott isn’t comfortable with all the attention.
“I don’t like glory and fanfare,” she says between clicks of the camera shutter. Still, she fixed herself up today because it’s important to her daughters that she finish what she started nearly 65 years ago. At age 87, she’s being recognized for what she did to advance civil and human rights in Georgia and throughout the South. It’s a story the world, and even her own children, didn’t fully appreciate until now.
Myra Payne Elliott at her home. Photo by Meg Buscema
In 1956, three African American women — Elliott, Barbara Pace Hunt and Iris Mae Welch — sued in federal court to desegregate Georgia State University (then called Georgia State College of Business Administration) and won. Though their names are not well known in the civil rights pantheon, their victory became the first federal court action against segregated education in Georgia, setting an important legal precedent that paved the way for James Meredith, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter to integrate universities in Mississippi and Georgia.
In their mid-20s at the time of the suit, Elliott and Hunt did all this while working and raising families, going up against authorities who went to jaw-dropping lengths to keep them from seeking an education. “Ground Crew,” a new book by Maurice C. Daniels, dean emeritus at the University of Georgia School of Social Work, tells the story of how the case helped bring down segregated education throughout the South.
On the afternoon of Feb. 20, Daniels told the story of these desegregation pioneers to a crowd of more than 850 attendees at Georgia State’s inaugural Groundbreaker Lecture, with Elliott and the children of the late Hunt seated in the front row.
“This is a story of great historical significance because it’s a story of hope, encouragement and sacrifice,” says Daniels. “It’s also a story of pain: the pain of these hidden figures, who are a great source of inspiration.”
“We now graduate more African Americans than any school in the country, and it's awfully relevant to us how that all came about,” says Wendy Hensel, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, who hosted the event. “We need to understand the history that brought us here and respect the people who brought us here.”
Confronting Resistance
Elliott still remembers the hamburgers at H. L. Green. They cost a nickel apiece and they are, to this day, the best she’s ever tasted.
“But we had to go in through the back door to get one,” she remembers. “By the time I got to be about 12 years old, I knew there was something wrong with that.”
Tuned into racial and economic injustice from an early age, Elliott sensed the importance of seeking an education. After graduating from a prestigious black Presbyterian high school in Keysville, Ga., where she was valedictorian, she briefly attended Spelman College but dropped out to raise children, and her parents also couldn’t afford the tuition. She worked as a maid, an elevator operator and in the Emory University lunchroom before getting a job at the Atlanta Life Insurance Company on Auburn Avenue, the most prominent black-owned business in Atlanta.
Hunt was also working on Auburn Avenue as a secretary at the Pittsburgh Courier, a black-owned newspaper. Like Elliott, she had been a bright student in high school, going on to attend Clark University for a year before putting her studies on hold to start a family. She aimed to become a journalist. Welch, a former schoolteacher, was working as a bookkeeper on Auburn as well. She had taken college courses in Alabama but didn’t finish.
All three women aspired to earn college degrees, and Georgia State seemed a natural place to do it. It was downtown near where they worked, and it was a commuter school with evening classes — perfect for Atlanta businesses who wanted to send their employees for continuing education. There was just one titanic obstacle: In 1956, Georgia’s colleges and universities remained deeply and bitterly segregated.
At the time, southern states were openly defying Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated education unconstitutional. As “Ground Crew” recounts, Georgia’s soon-to-be governor Marvin Griffin vowed to “maintain segregation in the schools ... come hell or high water” and later declared the Supreme Court decision “null, void and of no effect.” He even went so far as to try to prevent Georgia Tech from playing in the Sugar Bowl because the opposing team had one black player.
The state put up tremendous obstacles to prevent would-be students like Elliott, Hunt and Welch from even applying for admission. As Daniels explains in his book, the school didn’t always give out the application form to black applicants, so maintenance staff sometimes had to sneak them out under the cover of night. The Board of Regents instituted a number of policies designed to maintain segregation, including giving scholarships to black students to study out of state if the program they wanted wasn’t offered at Georgia’s black colleges. This was hardly a workable solution for Elliott and Hunt, who had jobs and families that couldn’t just be uprooted and moved.
Another policy required applicants to secure “character certifications” from three alumni. Given that 100 percent of University System of Georgia graduates were white, this was an impossible hurdle to clear at a time when social life remained deeply segregated. Policies like these were typical of other white colleges of the time, Daniels notes.
“Most of the policies of Georgia State that were designed to block the admission of black students were policies that had been handed down from the Board of Regents,” he says. Any school in the system that dared to admit a black student risked losing its state funding and being essentially shut down. “They were very similar to policies that other institutions in the Deep South also practiced.”
“I didn't think about it as being brave back then. I was scared after I got involved because they started hurting people.”
— Myra Payne Elliott
When their applications were rejected, Hunt, Elliott and Welch sued, aided by lawyers from the NAACP, which had also supported Horace T. Ward when he tried to enroll at the University of Georgia Law School six years earlier. That case was dismissed on a technicality. NAACP lawyers strategized that Hunt, Elliott and Welch might meet less resistance at Georgia State because it wasn’t the system’s flagship institution. It also seemed a safer option because they wouldn’t have to live on campus. (As Daniels points out, when Holmes and Hunter moved into the UGA dorms in 1961, rioters set fires outside and threw bricks at their windows.)
But the obstacles Elliott faced in the simple act of applying to school made her feel “unwanted.”
“My grandfather, my great-grandfather, my dad and my mom, they’d been paying taxes all these years,” she says. “If school was supported by Georgia taxes, and if we paid our share of Georgia taxes, why shouldn't we be able to go?”
She struggled to balance the lawsuit with her responsibilities to work, marriage and four small children while the case — and her private life — was splashed across the pages of newspapers. Georgia State’s own student paper, The Signal, denounced the NAACP as a communist organization and vociferously opposed the students’ attempts to enroll.
“We see no place for you at Georgia State,” threatened an open letter.
At trial, the defense assailed the women during cross-examination, looking for any speck of disqualifying information. They fixated on the fact that Elliott and Hunt had become mothers before getting married.
“They never mentioned that I was married,” Elliott remembers, her voice rising. “It made me feel like I had done something wrong because I was trying to live a normal life.”
Enduring all of this at the tender age of 26 required an uncommon fortitude, but Elliott shies away from such labels.
“I didn't think about it as being brave back then,” she recalls. “I was scared after I got involved because they started hurting people.”
Hunt, the lead plaintiff in the case, experienced an onslaught of threats as her daughter Alyce Pruitt recalls. There were harassing phone calls and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The final straw came when a group of people showed up on their front lawn.
“My mom came in my room and said, ‘Don’t you answer that door.’ We just stood there and didn’t answer and were very quiet,” Pruitt says. “She put her life on the line, and her kids’ lives, but when those people came to our apartment, that was it for her.”
Hunt packed up her daughters and left Atlanta before the lawsuit was finished. She even changed her name. When the ruling came down on Jan. 9, 1959, she learned about it in a letter.
On that date, the judge in the case, Boyd Sloane, issued an injunction declaring segregation unconstitutional at all Georgia colleges and universities. He agreed that the alumni certification requirement functionally barred black students from enrolling. The news made the front page of The New York Times.
Looking at a photograph of that day, Elliott notices the subdued expression on her face.
“I should have been smiling, but I just didn't feel like smiling,” she says. “I didn’t feel like jumping up and down and saying, ‘Hallelujah!’ I just thought, ‘Why’d we have to go through all that?’”
The ruling was bittersweet because the judge stopped short of ordering Georgia State to admit the three women, leaving the door open for the university to continue denying admission to black students on the basis of “moral character.” Elliott and Hunt, for having the audacity to seek an education while raising children, were thus denied.
In fact, segregation in Georgia did not go gently as “Ground Crew” details. Both of the state’s senators condemned the ruling, and new Gov. Ernest Vandiver threatened to shut down Georgia colleges entirely if federal courts forced them to integrate. Legislators passed a host of new laws aimed at preventing integration, and the Board of Regents instituted an age-limit rule that would automatically deny undergraduate admission to any applicant over the age of 21. This was the excuse used to deny admission to Iris Mae Welch, who was in her 40s at the time of the suit. Welch died in 1962, three years after the ruling. None of the three women ever enrolled at Georgia State.
Myra Payne Elliott (second from right) and her daughters (from left) Melissa Harland Hills, Jocelyn Gleaton and June Harland at Georgia State's Groundbreaker Lecture honoring Elliott for her work to desegregate the university. Photo by Steven Thackston
Myra Payne Elliott (second from right) and her daughters (from left) Melissa Harland Hills, Jocelyn Gleaton and June Harland at Georgia State's Groundbreaker Lecture honoring Elliott for her work to desegregate the university. Photo by Steven Thackston
Pivotal Role
“The elders always say, ‘Let old dogs lie, be them good doggies or bad doggies, let them lie,’” says Crystal Freeman, Barbara Hunt’s youngest daughter. “That’s not my attitude.”
Freeman has long been pushing for more recognition for what her mother and her co-plaintiffs accomplished, and the university’s new Groundbreaker Lecture series was inspired in part by those efforts.
“I want her story known and for them to be acknowledged for the sacrifices they made that could have cost them their lives and their children’s lives,” Freeman says. “Georgia State is where it is today because there were people who simply wanted an education.”
“We owe these women a debt of gratitude for their courage in forcing change on an unwilling university,” agrees Hensel. “We have to own that history and respect it and also celebrate the progress and achievement we’ve had since then.”
After the trial, Hunt moved to Texas, where she earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Texas at Arlington and two master's degrees. She worked civic-minded jobs for the United Way, SCLC and city governments before dying in 2005.
Elliott never did complete a four-year degree, though she went on to attend two junior colleges later in life. She’s lived to see her niece graduate from Georgia State with a degree in business administration, the very subject she hoped to study a half-century prior. She lived to see her daughter earn an MBA from Emory University, in whose lunchroom young Elliott once served spoonfuls of beans and sliced bread to white students getting the education she so badly wanted for herself.
And now she’s lived to see the Georgia State Senate and House of Representatives issue official proclamations acknowledging her and her co-plaintiffs, unveiled at the Feb. 20 lecture event. The crowd, including hundreds of students of color whose right to an education these three women fought for, broke into applause as Elliott made her way up to the dais to speak, flanked by her two daughters.
“The day you said I couldn't come, it hurt my feelings,” she said with characteristic understatement to the packed auditorium. “But you’ve come a long way.”
Below, watch a mini-documentary about Elliott, Hunt and Welch produced by university’s School of Film, Media & Theatre.
* Maya Kroth is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New York, Southern Living, Sunset and The Washington Post.
