Her most powerful weapon is her voice. It always has been. Bernice Johnson Reagon was born in Albany. The Baptist minister's daughter grew up immersed in the power and glory of spirituals. Reagon's activism began at Albany State in 1961. She was arrested for participating in a civil rights protest sponsored by SNCC, the Student Non–Violent […]
Warm Springs soothed his body and restored his spirit. Franklin D. Roosevelt made his first visit to the healing waters on this day in 1924. Roosevelt contracted polio three years earlier and traveled to Warm Springs on the advice of George Foster Peabody, his friend and part–owner of the springs. He visited 41 times. Other […]
It killed more Americans than all of our 20th century wars combined. When 138 soldiers at Camp Gordon in Atlanta were hit with it this day in 1918, the Spanish Flu epidemic had spread across Georgia. The flu hit just as World War I ended. That war took 10 million lives over four years. The […]
He's the only Georgian to ever be elected president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was born in Plains and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. To his wife Rosalynn's dismay, Carter left a promising naval career after his father's death in 1953 and returned to Plains to take over the family peanut business. Successful […]
He was a high school dropout who would be governor. Born in Atlanta, Lester Maddox worked at the Bell Bomber factory in Marietta during World War II. He opened the Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta in 1947. It became the focal point of his fierce opposition to integration and civil rights. He famously chased black patrons […]
Long before Plymouth, or Jamestown or even St. Augustine, there was another settlement in North American: the very first European attempt to establish a permanent colony on the mainland since the Vikings 500 years earlier. Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon and 600 Spanish colonists landed on Georgia's coast on this day in 1526, over 200 years […]
The rock of tradition versus the hard place of progress is an old Southern dilemma. John Donald Wade, born in Marshallville, knew it well. Wade’s deep Georgia roots ran back to his great grandfather, John Adam Treutlen, Georgia’s first governor. Teaching at Vanderbilt in the 1920s, Wade helped create one of the seminal books in […]
Tiger Woods hasn't done it. Jack Nicklaus didn't do it. But Atlanta's Bobby Jones did. On this date in 1930, Jones became the first and only golfer to win the Grand Slam: the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the British Amateur. Born in 1902, Jones learned to play golf at the […]
Three Georgians died on the Titanic. One of them was Archibald Butt. He was born in Augusta on this day in 1865. Archie Butt became a journalist for the Macon Telegraph. The Atlanta Constitution made him its Washington correspondent. The U.S. State Department appointed him Secretary of the American Embassy in Mexico. He was there […]
When Robert Benham was appointed the first African American on the Georgia Supreme Court, it was only one of a long line of firsts. Benham was born in Cartersville in 1946. He majored in political science at Tuskegee University and attended Harvard before graduating from the University of Georgia's School of Law in 1970. After […]
