Only two Georgians have served as Secretary of State. John Forsyth was one of them. Born in Virginia in 1780, Forsyth went to school in Wilkes County, Georgia, before graduating from the future Princeton University in 1799. He returned to Augusta to practice law and married the daughter of Josiah Meigs, the president of the […]
John Wesley lost his labor of love when he came to Georgia. The founder of the Methodist Church was born in England in 1703, becoming a strict man of God who spread the faith throughout England and America. Ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church in his mid-20s, Wesley and his brother Charles studied […]
A man who killed a political opponent in a duel nearly became the first president from Georgia, long before Jimmy Carter. William Crawford began his political career in 1803 as a state legislator from Oglethorpe County. Even though he killed a political enemy in a duel in 1802, Crawford’s political star kept rising, with service […]
He was Georgia’s Civil War governor who opposed almost every Confederate policy. Joseph Emerson Brown was born in South Carolina in 1821 and was raised in north Georgia. He rode a successful legal career all the way to the governorship in 1859. Brown championed the common man and for the rest of his life he […]
An African-American with a best-selling novel — a book that was turned into a movie — that was unheard of in the America of the late 1940s. Yet Frank Yerby did just that. Born in Augusta in 1916 to racially mixed parents, Yerby, all his life, had trouble being accepted in either black or white […]
They were the quintessential college rock band of the 1980s, working in the town Rolling Stone called “the best college music scene in the country.” Michael Stipe was an art student at the University of Georgia when he met Peter Buck at the Wuxtry Record store in Athens. Together with Mike Mills and Bill Berry, […]
She was an outspoken opponent of slavery who married one of the largest slaveholders in the South. Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was born in London in 1809 in a family of actors, and she became an established actress herself. In Philadelphia in 1832 she met and eventually married Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner with […]
It can fall on any day between November 22 and 28, depending on the year, but it hasn’t always been the fourth Thursday in November. Thanksgiving is an American tradition that goes back to 1621, when the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians celebrated their shared harvest. American colonists routinely marked days of Thanksgiving, and in […]
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. considered it one of his few failures. The Albany Movement in the early 1960s had a simple but formidable objective: the desegregation of an entire community, from bus stations to lunch counters. A coalition mobilized thousands and brought national attention to southwest Georgia, particularly after Dr. King’s arrival in December […]
A Georgia native founded the most influential black newspaper of the 20th century. Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born on St. Simon’s island in 1868 and raised in Savannah. He attended law school in Chicago. When Abbott couldn’t find a job as a lawyer, he turned to journalism and founded the Chicago Defender. Within a decade […]
