Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, as we see in the story of former Georgia Governor Thomas Hardwick. Born in Thomasville in 1872, Hardwick served in the state legislature in the 1890s as a staunch advocate of disenfranchising black voters. Yet later, he lost an election by opposing the Ku Klux Klan. Hardwick also served […]
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, […]
When you help guide a city through a depression and then, later, guide it through the civil rights era…when you are responsible for Atlanta’s becoming the aviation capital that it is…then it’s fair to say you’ve had an impact. William Hartsfield was mayor of Atlanta longer than any other person. He was born in Atlanta […]
A vice presidency can be thankless at best. But when you don’t want the job, and you don’t get along with your president, it’s even worse. Georgia’s Alexander Stephens reluctantly supported secession in 1861. To his horror, he was elected Confederate vice president by the Provisional Congress, which hoped his election would persuade other Southern […]
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 […]
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 […]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on this day in 1882, but perhaps no other president besides Jimmy Carter had such strong Georgia ties. Stricken with polio in 1921, Roosevelt made his first visit to Warm Springs three years later. It became his second home. He founded what is now the […]
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” So said James Madison, and after the revolution, Georgians realized the fledgling republic would survive only with educated citizens. In 1784, the General Assembly set aside 40,000 acres for a state […]
Theodore Roosevelt’s great-great-grandfather was Georgia’s first chief executive. Archibald Bulloch was born in Charleston in 1730 and moved to Georgia in 1758. When the revolutionary crisis began, Bulloch became an outspoken leader of the Liberty Party that championed American rights. He served as president of Georgia’s Provincial Congress that met in 1775 to address the […]
Georgia’s first African-American congressman was born a slave. Jefferson Franklin Long was born in Alabama in 1836. His master sold him to a man in Macon. Long taught himself to read and write while setting type for the Macon newspaper. Long attended Macon’s African Methodist Episcopal Church and was deeply influenced by Henry McNeal Turner, […]
