t no one ever discovered that it was in violation of due process until recently . . ." (Emphasis supplied.)
Hawkins went back to Washington once again, but the Earl Warren court was exhausted. It sent Hawkins to a segregationist federal district judge, Dozier DeVane, who continued to stall Hawkins. The Board of Control, meanwhile, stiffened the entrance requirements past the point where Hawkins was able to pass them.
In June 1958, nine years after filing his application, Hawkins gave up. He sacrificed his own ambition to the cause, stipulating that if DeVane ordered Florida's graduate schools to accept all qualified black applications he would withdraw his. The UF law school admitted its first black student three months later. There was no disorder, no boycott, no mass exodus by whites.
Hawkins' family had suffered. To save his wife's Lake County teaching job, they had to pretend to be separated and then divorced. Many nights, she drove furtively to Daytona Beach to visit him. A niece, Gloria Barton, rode along. "My job," she said in a recent interview, "was to keep her awake."
Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, a particularly notorious racist, jailed Hawkins' nephew as a rape suspect. That was too much for Collins, who intervened. McCall let the nephew go and framed a mentally retarded white youth, Jesse Daniels, who was railroaded into a mental hospital for 14 years. Freed eventually by court order, Daniels was compensated by the Legislature.
Virgil Hawkins went to Boston, where he drove a cab, waited on tables and did other odd jobs to finance a degree from the New England School of Law in 1964.
But Florida refused to let him take its bar examination because the New England school was not accredited until after he had graduated. He had reached the dead end of a long, bitter road.
Or so it seemed until the Florida Supreme Court, in 1974, ordered Ben Ervin, the brother of Justice Richard Ervin (the former attorney general) admitted to the Bar without having to retake the examination. He had flunked it four times. The pretext was that but for the Korean War, Ervin would have attended the University of Florida law school in time to be automatically licensed under what was called a "diploma privilege."
Hadn't Hawkins wanted to attend Florida even earlier? Didn't he have thousands of pages of evidence to prove it? Hadn't he earned the same break as Ben Ervin?
Of course he had, and in 1976 the Florida Supreme Court admitted him to the practice of law. He was nearly 70 years old.
There was more intrigue to that decision than the court wanted known. Digging deep into Florida archives, Harley Herman, a white lawyer in Lake County, found early drafts in which the majority intended only to let Hawkins take the Bar exam. But there was now a black justice on the court, Joseph Hatchett, who thought Hawkins deserved to be admitted outright just like Ben Ervin. He wrote a blistering 12-page dissent that detailed "the injustice members of this Court once willfully wrought" with their "lawlessness on the part of men sworn to uphold the law." One of those lawless men, B.K. Roberts, was still there. The majority gave in to Hatchett, who diplomatically withdrew his dissent. Soon after, Roberts retired. President Jimmy Carter appointed Hatchett to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Hawkins saga would not have a happy ending. He was unprepared for the sole practice he attempted. He made ethical mistakes, in a criminal case for which he wasn't even paid, that led to the court putting him on professional probation. After a second series of violations, in which he mishandled his nephew's guardianship, Hawkins faced disbarment and resigned. "When I get to heaven," he told the court, "I want to be a member of the Florida Bar."
"What he was feeling inwardly, he kept to himself," Barton said. "Outwardly he was jolly, and he would make you laugh, tell jokes all the time."
"I know what I did. I integrated schools in Florida. No one can take that away from me," he said a few months before he died of a stroke in 1988.
Only three white people at