Hawkins held to his dreams, opened doors wide for others
“I’m older than you, so why is your hair whiter than mine?” Melvin Hawkins teased his brother Virgil in 1949, as author Gilbert King tells the story in his book “Beneath a Ruthless Sun.”
Virgil Hawkins, then only in his early 40s, had a quick reply. Maybe those signs of aging came from being fearful, on the move, “running, ducking, dodging and hiding under houses.”
What had Hawkins, a former teacher and principal, done to send him into hiding? Simply this: He had applied to the University of Florida College of Law, which had turned him down because he was Black. This was during the days of strict segregation, perhaps nowhere more strict than Lake County, where Hawkins was born.
Hawkins’ efforts and the NAACP lawsuit that followed on his behalf fueled such harassment that family members were afraid even to let anyone know their name was Hawkins.
Bittersweet deal
After a federal judge ordered the university to integrate in 1958, university officials negotiated a deal that had to be bittersweet for Hawkins. They would admit other Black students without protest if he would withdraw his application. Maybe “officials just couldn’t stand the idea of the Black guy who had caused so much trouble sitting in their classrooms,” Lake Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie wrote in 2003.
When Hawkins finally earned a law degree in the 1960s from Boston’s New England School of Law, which was not accredited, he was not allowed to sit for the Florida Bar exam.
By the time the state Supreme Court changed course and voted to admit Hawkins into the practice of law in the late 1970s, he was aging and not really prepared for his dream profession, as his longtime champion, attorney Harley Herman of Plant City, has said. Hawkins took on clients who paid him little or nothing and made mistakes that cost him his license and his reputation.
But after Hawkins’ death in 1988, Herman’s efforts led the state to posthumously readmit Hawkins to the profession of law, and the University of Florida granted him a posthumous degree. In 1989, the university named a law school clinic in his honor.
‘Florida’s Rosa Parks’
Recently, Herman wore a T-shirt declaring Hawkins “Florida’s Rosa Parks” at a gathering of folks committed to restoring the Rosenwald school that Hawkins attended in Okahumpka, just south of Leesburg.
Just like Parks, Hawkins inspired others, Herman says, citing Hawkins’ fortitude. “You didn’t get involved in the movement in this state without facing consequences,” he notes.
Today the former school building faces a street named for Hawkins, but nearby Mount Olive Baptist Church, where Hawkins family members have worshipped, is on a street still named North Quarters Road — an echo of the era when enslaved people lived in areas called “the quarters.”
It’s a reminder that when Hawkins, born in 1906, grew up in Lake County, many Black residents worked in the turpentine and citrus industries in conditions not too far removed from slavery. As a young person, Hawkins worked in the fields, and many at the helm of society would likely have viewed him as “a field hand, a disposable person,” Herman notes.
Instead, Hawkins persevered as he pursued a path of education and opened doors for others.
“He opened the door but never walked through it,” attorney W. George Allen, the first Black person to earn a law degree from UF, said in 2008. “He was my hero.”
Hawkins’ “story should be known,” his niece Livingston noted in 2008. “It should be taught in schools and remembered, because it’s a lesson in perseverance. Justice delayed is still justice.”