The burning of Darien, Georgia, depicted in the Civil War movie, Glory, was one of the most controversial acts of the War. Situated on the Atlantic coast, Darien thrived during the antebellum period as the shipping point for cotton, rice, and lumber. In June 1863, most of Darien’s 500 residents had already fled inland when […]
Morehouse College and Atlanta University each once had a white president. John Hope changed that. Hope was born in Augusta in 1868 to a white father and free-born black mother. After graduating from Brown University, Hope taught first in Nashville. He married future black activist Lugenia Burns and moved to Atlanta to teach at Atlanta […]
She was the first woman and first African-American to lie in state at the Georgia State Capitol rotunda. Coretta Scott was born in 1927 in Alabama and studied music education at Antioch College in Ohio. After graduation she enrolled in The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she met a young Boston University […]
To be African-American and born during slavery didn’t necessarily mean you were a slave. Lucy Craft Laney was born in 1854, but her father had purchased freedom for him and his wife. For Laney, freedom meant education. Able to read and write by age four and translate Latin by 12, she joined the first class […]
“Now he belongs to the ages.” That was said of Abraham Lincoln. It applies no less to Martin Luther King Jr. King was planning a “Poor People’s March” on Washington in 1968 when he went to Memphis to help striking black sanitation workers. The civil rights leader had broadened his approach, speaking out against poverty, […]
His basketball skills were so great that he was called the “human highlight film.” Dominique Wilkins was born in 1960 in France, where his father was serving in the Air Force. After playing high school basketball in North Carolina, Wilkins came to the University of Georgia in 1979 to play for coach Hugh Durham. Wilkins […]
He was one of the first Georgians to attempt to create a truly color-blind society after the Civil War. Tunis Campbell was born in New Jersey in 1812 to free black parents. Educated at an all-white academy in New York, he joined the abolitionist movement. By the early 1860s Campbell was a married father and […]
Margaret Mitchell portrayed him as a corrupt carpetbagger, whose great failing was to be a Republican who supported African-American equality. Rufus Bullock was born in 1834 in New York. He moved to Augusta and did business with the Confederates after the Civil War began, though he opposed secession. He was a lieutenant colonel in the […]
A man born a slave in Georgia was the first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Henry Ossian Flipper was born in Thomasville in 1856. After the Civil War, Henry graduated from West Point in 1877 and joined the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 10th Cavalry Regiment. At Fort Davis in […]
She has been superior in a lot of courts. Leah Ward Sears was born into a military family in Germany in 1955. Her family eventually settled in Savannah. A graduate of Emory Law, Sears was working at an Atlanta law firm when Mayor Andrew Young appointed her to Atlanta’s traffic court. In 1988, at 32, […]
