Bending With the Wind: A Lesson in Survival

By Al Burt

Vol. 1, No. 4, 1979, pp. 14-16

In his 72 years. Virgil D. Hawkins has learned something about the ways to fight and to survive and sometimes to succeed. But he wonders whether he ever can explain these hard lessons to the young. Some want to listen, and some do not.

He was not the gunfighter who sought one dramatic showdown to decide whether he would live free or die. His has the patient courage, the kind easily misunderstood. He became free by inches, demanding year after year after year what was his, and finally winning.

At age 42, Hawkins applied for admission to the University of Florida Law School, and the application was denied because he was Black. That was 1949. For nine years he pursued a steady legal battle. Three times it went before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1958, a federal district court ordered that he he admitted. Then, with victory in his hands, he passed it up and went to Boston University. Because of him, other Blacks were able to enter his home state’s principal law school, but he went North.

The unusual story continues. He earned a Master of Arts degree at Boston University, and a law degree at the New England School of Law, but subtle racism drove him hack South. “I didn’t like that,” Hawkins said. “I never knew where I was. In the South you always know. It’s just like walking on a carpet with a snake in it. I’d rather see the snake out here so I can hit him than to have him hiding in that carpet and I don’t know when he’s going to bite me.”

Hawkins returned to Leesburg, Fla., his north central Florida home, and went to work. He never took the Florida Bar examination. He explained that he had to support his family and that he got involved in making a living and kept putting it off, and found it hard after all the years away to settle down to studying again.

In 1976, he petitioned to be allowed to practice law in Florida without taking the examination. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, stating that Hawkins had a “claim on this court’s conscience.” In February 1977, 28 years after his quest began, he was admitted to the Florida Bar. “It’s durability that counts,” he said.

Hawkins, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears goldrimmed glasses, now works in a secondstory office above a shoe store in Eustis, Fla., as director of consumer affairs for the Lake County Community Action Agency. He also practices privately in nearby Leesburg. Most of his work involves minor criminal and civil cases before the county court.

Not everyone understood the course he chose, nor do they all understand now, but to Hawkins it was the intelligent way. “I wanted to do it,” he said, explaining his decision not to enter the University of Florida Law School after fighting to clear the way. “I knew they were settin’ for me. ready for me. I would have been the whipping boy. I didn’t want that.” He took away their target, made it easier for the others. He tries especially hard to tell young people how it was, and does not always succeed.

A big moment for him came when the University of Florida Law School invited him to he a member of a discussion panel there. He got a lot of questions. “They liked

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me,” he said happily. “The Black kids up there appreciate me. They were interested in the truth about segregation. They wanted me to explain how it was then, how we stood up against it. They respected me for what I did. They didn’t understand it all, but they liked me and it made me feel good.”

That was the exceptional experience, however. He worries because most of the young he encounters are not so receptive to the hard lessons he offers. He talks to them and tells them about the past and tries to explain, but they expect the answers to be more swift and more complete.

“The young ones,” he said, shaking his head. “They think if you’ve got gray hair, you’re a headbower; that you went along with everything. You weren’t violent, they say. They think they know everything.

“My Daddy told me how the pines and the oaks were the first to get blown down in the hurricanes, but the palms had a chance because they bent with the winds.

“The young don’t understand that. They have the idea of throwing bricks and retaliation and things of that type. They think that when you’re born, you’re born in a pasture of instant success. All you have to do is step outside and be an instant success.

“Don’t have to do anything, don’t have to try anything, don’t have to suffer anything.

“They think they can get on a show and answer a few questions and win a million dollars. They think they can touch the right fellow and get a job. They don’t care anything about being fit for the job. Being prepared for it don’t make any difference. Just want the job.

“Black youth has too far to go. He is behind, way behind. He don’t have time for pointing fingers and that stuff.

“When O.J. Simpson gets the football, he don’t stop to find fault with the men trying to tackle him. He just outruns ’em.

“All the things they said and did to me in my day, if I paid attention to them, if I stopped to hate, I never would have done anything.”

Not many men could speak so bluntly and expect to retain stature in their community. Hawkins can because he has been through the fire, even though it was the fire of another time and he did it his own way.

Hawkins’ story remains an important one because it combines human and practical dimensions with bona fide credentials of suffering and eventual success. He was born south of Leesburg near Okahumpka, then a kaolin mining town, the son of a laborer who preached each Sunday in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He had seven brothers and sisters.

He attended the first six grades in an all-Black elementary school where one teacher in one room taught 60 children of all grades. “It was tough in those days. Most counties in Florida were tough then,” he said. “Blacks didn’t have much chance. It was generally conceded you didn’t do certain things, like go to town at night. There were separate restrooms, separate waiting rooms, separate fountains. Everything was separate.

“A Black man was not thought of as an individual, unless he had a particular White friend. Then they might say, ‘Old Virgil, he’s all right. We’ll do this for him.’

“A Black man had no rights, no rights whatsoever. He just bowed and took whatever the White man gave him. He could be satisfied or be shot.”

After the sixth grade, he went to Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, where he cut and split and stacked furnace firewood to pay his way.

“A Black man paid as much to go to high school as the White man did to go to college. We had to go away somewhere.” Only one of his brothers and sisters made it as far as Edward Waters College with him.

Briefly, he attended Lincoln University in Chester, Pa., and then came back to Bethune Cookman College in Daytona Beach, where he worked and went to school parttime until he got a bachelors degree. At that point, he returned to Leesburg and began the struggle to attend law school at the state university just 70 miles up the road in Gainesville.

Hawkins now declares himself to be a happy man, not a bitter one. He thinks bitterness is a distraction from the ,pb n=”16″/ goal and a waste of effort. “We’ve got to put on the whole armor of citizenship,” he said. He keeps looking for a way to make the young realize that in other times and other circumstances there was something heroic even in the heritage from Uncle Tom” and the “handkerchief heads.”

“They were fighting but at the same time bowing and accommodating the situation so that when the sun started shining the Black man could stand up like a palm tree.

“They were taking all that for their ancestry,” Hawkins said. “If they could take those lashes on the back, I could take the verbal lashes. Each of us has to do the best we can in our time.”

Virgil Hawkins, a patient warrior, warns of snakes in the carpet almost in the same breath that he praises Uncle Tom and the “handkerchief heads.” Some do not understand that, but it is his way.

Al Burt is a roving columnist for the Miami Herald.

Blacks Confronting Minority Problems in the Sunshine State

By Al Burt

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 20-22

For the first time in Florida, a broadly based coalition of Black organizations has adopted an agenda for political action. Its priorities reveal the nature of minority problems in Florida. It seeks changes in matters ranging from local police action to U.S. policy toward Haitian refugees.

Known as the Florida Black Agenda Coalition, it has called for a task force to study the possibilities of a state operated lottery, whose funds would be earmarked for education, economic development and aid to the elderly; a change in the controversial Fleeing Felon Law, which permits law enforcement officers to shoot suspects fleeing the scene of a felony; property taxes scaled to income;, single-member legislative districts to increase minority representation; and the end of social promotions in the schools.

The coalition further asks for universal voter registration by postcard to make political participation easier. They are also seeking a state-financed study of sickle cell anemia and the disproportionately high incidence of cancer among Blacks; prison administrations that reflect the prison populations; resources for the poor accused of capital crimes that match those of the prosecution; and political asylum for 8,000 Haitian refugees in Florida.

“We are trying to identify the issues and the programs that have high impact for minority communities,” said Marvin Davies, minority affairs assistant to Gov. Bob Graham. Davies is chairman of the political action forum of the coalition, whose members are either elected officials or heads of Black organizations.

The issues go across the board, to all levels from federal to local. “There were somebig ones in terms of priorities,” Davies said, “We think the requiring of single member districts, for example, would result in the election of five more Blacks to the state House and three to the Senate.”

At present, the 120 members of the Florida House are apportioned in computer-drawn districts based onthe 1970 census. It has 21 single-member districts and the rest are the multimember districts with from two to six representatives each. There are four Blacks in the House. The 40-member Senate has five single-member districts, no Blacks.

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Beyond asking that the 8,000 Haitian refugees be recognized as political refugees, Davies says, “We are asking federal and state help for them while their status is being determined. In some cases, it may take two to three years for the legal process to determine if they will be admitted to this country. During the interim they should be given government help. We ought to be sensititve enough to know something’s wrong, something is causing them to come. Even if the reasons were economic, they deserve aid while that is being decided.”

The Fleeing Felon Law was a source of statewide controversy, but particularly in Pensacola and Tampa. Davies said, “Tampa corrected the problem with local policy, but we believe a change in the law is both preferable and still needed elsewhere.”

The lottery study follows an unsuccessful statewide referendum during former Gov. Reubin Askew’s last term in office (he opposed) to permit gambling casinos in Florida. The pro-casino forces similarly focused on the tax benefits for educational and other programs.

The agenda includes changes in six broad areas – affirmative action, criminal justice, education, business, politics, health-social, and taxes.

In affirmative action, the coalition asks for financial resources adequate for investigation and enforcement of equal opportunity laws; that management be held accountable for performance in reaching goals; that management proportionally reflect the work force; that unemployment be identified as the number one problem; that testing procedures be eliminated which systematically

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screen out Blacks; that there be an annual report outlining affirmative action performance at all levels of government; that each personnel office include minority recruiters; that the Florida Commission on Human Relations be more fully funded.

In education, the group wants a task force to study ways and means of helping Black students toward more positive attitudes and self-concepts; the monitoring of primary education to help under-achievers and the monitoring of education systems promotions to insure the upward mobility of Black educators; the elimination of social promotions for all students; the elimination of “tracking” (grouping by performance); better funding of programs at Florida AM University and a reaffirmation of its future; the Florida Student Assessment Test (literacy) to be used for diagnostic purposes only.

In reference to the economy, recommendations include a request that the governor commission an annual minority economic conference (the first, a joint federal-state affair, was held Dec. 78 in Orlando); full implementation of the Small Business Administration Act; hiring of Blacks in policy positions of state government, particularly in positions relating to tourism and development in the Department of Commerce (a Black, Don Griffin, has been hired as deputy director of the Department of Commerce); that the governor solicit and encourage private, state and federal help in recruiting minority developers; the development of bonding capability for Black contractors and developers; that Black firms be included in domestic and international trade shows and missions; that Black contractors be considered in the letting of all government contracts.

In addition to universal postcard voter registration, and the offering of registration on the day of the election, changes called for in the political area include a voting card be required for all high school graduates 18 or over; the governor’s support as promised in his election campaign for single-member legislative districts (and in state and local offices as well); an independent commission to draw the new districts rather than leaving it to the legislature; full representation in Congress for Washington, D.C.; making the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a legal holiday (a legislative resolution now permits that day off at the employee’s expense).

In the area of criminal. justice, changes in the Fleeing Felon Law, resources for the poor accused of capital rimes and prison administration led the proposals, but others include permitting the poor a choice of attorney when one must be provided by the state and for all communities, a citizens review board on police actions.

In health, the agenda seeks subsidized energy and utility bills for the poor; free transportation of the poor to human services; hiring of social services workers to reflect the population they serve; th’ previously mentioned studies of cancer and sickle cell anemia (a bill on sickle cell anemia was defeated in the legislature last year and a new one is pending in both houses which would provide $50,000 for a study of the problem); support for social programs aimed at teenaged pregnancy; greater state financial effort on the problems of malnutrition and hypertension in Blacks.

In the field related to taxes, the group asked for a state operated lottery; a proposal that the sales tax be frozen at four percent; that the homestead exemption on property taxes be increased from $5,000 to $25,000, thereby lowering tax bills in the lower price range; that property taxes be scaled progressively to income; that no citizen should lose his home for failure to pay back taxes until the tax assessor had tacked conspicuous notice of that prospect on the house in question. The latter resulted from a case in which a West Florida couple lost their home because they did not understand the liability involved in $3.50 back taxes.

The body has already adopted the agenda. The coalition’s plans now include a fundraising event whereby they can secure enough money to publish their agenda and make it available to every school and every home in the area. The coalition will be meeting with all candidates, both local and national, to make its agenda known and to let the candidates know what is expected of them in exchange for their votes.

Al Burt is a roving columnist for the Miami Herald.