Atlanta ? Judges, college presidents and a former United Nations ambassador were among the several hundred people who remembered Friday the contributions of Wichita native Donald L. Hollowell.

Hollowell, a civil rights attorney who once helped free the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from prison and worked to desegregate Atlanta’s public schools, died of heart failure Monday. He was 87.

Two dozen speakers spoke for more than three hours of the attorney — who also was credited for helping desegregate the University of Georgia — at Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King Jr. Chapel.

“He was one hell of a man,” Superior Court Judge Marvin Arrington said. “Every time you drink out of a water fountain that doesn’t have ‘black’ and ‘white,’ you ought to say ‘Thank you, Don.”‘

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hollowell served as one of the lead lawyers in the desegregation of Atlanta schools. He represented King in 1960 after the civil rights leader was sent to Reidsville Prison on a DeKalb County traffic charge. He was attorney for Charlayne Hunter (later Hunter-Gault) and Hamilton Holmes Jr. as they integrated UGA in 1961.

Hollowell’s firm worked to desegregate Augusta’s buses and Macon’s schools and won a landmark case requiring Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital to admit black doctors and dentists to its staff.

“Donald Hollowell made you wish we had kept vestiges of the monarchy,” said former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, himself a civil rights icon. “He was indeed ‘Lord Hollowell.'”