Georgians weren’t feeling the love, even if it was Valentine’s Day. The Battle of Kettle Creek was fought during the American Revolution on this day in 1779. 600 loyalists from Georgia and the Carolinas were camped on the creek, which flows into the Little River in Wilkes County, Georgia’s backcountry in those days. The British […]
It was not a flag that all Georgians could rally around. On this date in 1956, Governor Marvin Griffin signed legislation to change the Georgia flag to one that included the Confederate battle emblem on two-thirds of the banner. Democratic Party leader John Sammons Bell began the campaign a year earlier after two controversial Supreme […]
After years of planning and two months crossing the Atlantic, James Oglethorpe and 114 colonists climbed 40 feet up the bluff from the Savannah River on this day in 1733 and founded the colony of Georgia. George II granted the Georgia trustees a charter for the colony a year earlier. The trustees’ motto was Non […]
It started with Deliverance in 1972. From there, Burt Reynolds “delivered” a lot of film business to the state of Georgia. As he was becoming Hollywood’s biggest box office draw for five years running, Georgia became number three in the nation for film production behind only New York and California. Burton Leon Reynolds, Jr. was […]
He was the other signer from Georgia of the U.S. Constitution. William Few was born in 1748 in Maryland and moved to Richmond County near Augusta in the 1770s. Few was an active Patriot during the American Revolution. He served in the military, in the state legislature, and as a delegate to the 1777 Georgia […]
She was born in Eatonton in 1944 and at age 8 she was blinded in one eye by a BB gun fired by her brother, a traumatic event that crippled her self-confidence. She was eventually homecoming queen and valedictorian at Butler-Baker High School. But it was Alice Walker’s searing literary portraits of African-American life and […]
Before Vince Dooley became synonymous with Georgia football, there was Wally Butts. Known as the “Little Round Man,” Butts was born in Milledgeville and earned scholarships in three sports at Mercer University. Butts became the University of Georgia’s head football coach in 1939. Over 22 seasons he led the Bulldogs to 140 wins, four SEC […]
The white South’s opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the 1950s was known as “Massive Resistance,” and while Georgia’s reaction wasn’t as violent as other states, it was no less defiant. On this day in 1956, Governor Marvin Griffin addressed a joint session of the General Assembly and urged lawmakers to invoke the doctrine of interposition […]
The poll tax, a bulwark of the Jim Crow era, was one of many roadblocks thrown up to keep African-Americans from exercising their right to vote. Although the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1870, guaranteed former male slaves the right to vote, the poll tax, which all voters had to pay was […]
As an actor, and as an activist, Ossie Davis made his mark. Born Rayford Chatman Davis in 1917 in Cogdell, Georgia, in Clinch County, he got his nickname from the way his mother pronounced his initials. Davis served in Africa in World War II, and made his Broadway debut in 1946 in the play Jeb, […]
