Horace Ward
from his office on the twelfth floor at 75 Spring Street,
Judge Horace Taliaferro Ward—his middle name is the same as
Booker T. Washington’s—can see Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark
Atlanta University, two of which gave him degrees. The University
of Georgia, which he never did attend (not for lack of trying), is too
far off to glimpse.
The Richard B. Russell building in which he now sits is also a
long way from Ms. B.D. Davis’s small, segregated classroom in
LaGrange, Georgia, where he read Robinson Crusoe and skipped
fifth grade on his way to becoming valedictorian of East Depot
Street High School, a three-year graduate of Morehouse, and, at
twenty-three, the first person of color to attempt to attend UGA as
a law student.
Judge Ward, now eighty-two, recalls how he got here: “Austin T.
Walden was a lawyer from Atlanta who represented the NAACP
in Georgia. He came to LaGrange when I was a high school student. I got to see my first black lawyer! I read about him later and
thought, maybe if he succeeded in it, I could too.”
8 8 | at l a n ta | d e c e m b e r 2 0 0 9
In September 1950, Ward applied to the University of Georgia
School of Law. Nine months later, his answer came. Ward remembers the wording: “Mr. Ward, your application for admission has
been received and is hereby denied.”
He appealed the decision. In 1952, a discrimination lawsuit was
filed in the northern Georgia federal court. Not until December
1956 did the case go to trial. In the interim, Ward had endured
a real war in Korea, and, out in 1955, enrolled at Northwestern’s
law school. After a five-day trial, the judge dismissed Ward’s case
without saying why he’d been denied admission.
Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes had a trial of their
own in December 1960, when they attempted to gain admittance
to UGA. Ward represented them. On January 6, 1961, it was ruled
that the university had to admit them. “The judge said that if they
were white they would have been admitted a long time before,”
says Ward.
In the fall of 1979, President Jimmy Carter made Ward a federal
judge on the same court that struck down his discrimination suit
in 1952. Appointed for life, he’s been there thirty years. He’ll be
back again next year, with a reduced caseload. “I don’t have any
real hobbies,” Ward says. “I don’t play golf or tennis. But I read a
lot of history.” —charles bethea