Dr. Reginald Hawkins - in Memory of a Civil Rights Giant

On Monday, Sept. 10, America lost one of its unsung legends to the hereafter. Dr. Reginald Hawkins - whose name was synonymous with the fight for equal rights throughout the Mid-Atlantic states - died at Carolinas Medical Center-Mercy campus in Charlotte, NC. Although not as popular as Rev. Martin Luther King, his amazing style and charisma championed the cause of African-American rights as few have ever done.

"Doc Hawkins," as his friends knew him, was a dentist and ordained minister who lived the cause of civil rights. In the summer 1954, he and others in Charlotte sat down at the new Douglas Airport restaurant. They were denied service immediately due to their color. Yet, they used that denial of launch a letter-writing campaign to the Federal Aviation Administration and other governmental bodies that resulted in desegregation of the airport's restaurant two years later. In 1961, Hawkins led a controversial two-week boycott of what was then Irwin Avenue Junior High School in Charlotte. He told students to stay home rather than attend a second-rate facility: "Tell them you're sick of segregation and hand-me-down-itis." At a May, 1963 rally on the steps of the Mecklenburg County (NC) Courthouse, he shouted, "We are not going to cooperate anymore with segregation. We shall not be pacified with gradualism; we shall not be satisfied with tokenism. We want freedom and we want it now."

Throughout his life, the stocky preacher was extremely vocal about the equality issue, with the spirit of the cause animating him like a Pentacostal evangelist (though he was Presbyterian by denomination): shouting, waving his arms, prancing about the stage, and telling his message with an ad-lib, machine-gun delivery that his supporters loved. Heknew, within his very soul, the message he had to get out, so there was no need for notes.He actively fought for desegregation in local schools, hotels, restaurants, hospitals and the YWCA with the same passion that he brought to every podium, lecturn and audience.

Outspoken and bluntly "laying it on the line" at times, he made a lot of whites (and some blacks) uneasy with his daring rhetoric. But he had leagues of faithful followers. Former mayor Harvey Gantt - the first African-American mayor of Charlotte - said, "Dr. Hawkins was a real pioneer, a fearless civil rights worker. He called it as he saw it."

His "militant" (as the Charlotte Observer called him back in the early Sixties) stance came at a cost: in November, 1965, his house was bombed with dynamite, and he was the target of harassing phone calls and shots fired at his house. In 1973, his daughter Pauletta was shot and paralyzed, and her three small children killed, in an execution-style attack on a Muslim center in Washington, where she lived.

But Neitsche once said, "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." "Doc" Hawkins was the embodiment of that statement; he believed so strongly in what he was doing that he kept on going - in fact, the violence aimed at him only appeared to give him more strength and initiative.

In 1968, he announced his candidacy for governor of North Carolina at only 44 years of age. On the day Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was brutally gunned down, he (King) was scheduled to be in the Tarheel State for Hawkins' gubernatorial campaign. And, although he was defeated both in 1968 and another attempt in 1971, "Doc" stirred the state - in fact, America, with his amazing oratory:

"The establishment has discounted the poor, the black, the low-income and liberal whites. It had been divide and conquer. This is the dream I have for North Carolina: to bring us together, black and white."

"Too long have black people sought a place at the bargaining table, only to receive the crumbs after dinner is over."Today, we are seeing racial togetherness and understanding as never before. African-Americans of all ages, ideals and of either gender no longer have to "beg" for crumbs, but can enjoy a large, healthy piece of the social, economic and political pie. And it's due, in part, to this human dynamo who truly believed in his cause ...