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 […]
Jimmy Carter first ran for governor in 1966 as a moderate, losing to Lester Maddox. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. In 1970, Carter ran as the candidate of the ordinary guy, making not-so-subtle racial appeals to white conservative Georgians. In the Democratic primary, he denounced former Governor Carl Sanders as a crony of […]
It may be the Jordan River, but Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff’s name was pronounced “Jerden.” Born in 1944, Hamilton Jordan always loved politics. He was voted “most likely to become governor” in high school. He got close. Literally. After interning for Senator Richard Russell, he worked on Jimmy Carter’s failed try for Georgia governor […]
The Mexican War in 1848 triggered new and thorny issues in a country already beset with divisions between North and South. The war added 500,000 square miles of new western territory. Would the new territory be slave or free, and who would decide? Could Congress ban slavery from new territories or would settlers decide for […]
George Wallace he most definitely was not. Carl Sanders was born in 1925 in Augusta. He served in the Air Force in World War II, then returned to the University of Georgia for his law degree. He entered politics on the fast track: elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1954, the state Senate […]
His John Hancock is rarer than John Hancock’s. Born in England in 1735, Button Gwinnett came to Savannah 30 years later. He bought St. Catherine’s Island and became a planter. In 1776 he was elected commander of Georgia’s Continental Army Battalion during the American Revolution. When political opponents- including Lachlan McIntosh- challenged his election, he […]
Mixing religion and politics worked out well for Henry McNeal Turner. Free-born in South Carolina in 1834, he was educated by white attorneys at a firm where he did janitorial work. Drawn to preaching, he led revivals in Macon, Athens, and Augusta. He pastored a church in Washington D.C., where he met Republican congressmen Charles […]
It was a comeback tour for the man who had been Confederate president. Jefferson Davis lived quietly at his Mississippi home in the decades after the Civil War. But in 1886, he laid the cornerstone for a Confederate memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Henry Grady, the enterprising editor of the Atlanta Constitution, invited Davis to Atlanta […]
Wyche Fowler, Jr. was once known as the “night mayor of City Hall” working as a troubleshooter for Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. As a 29-year-old law student, Fowler won election to Atlanta’s City Council in 1970. He lost a congressional bid to Andrew Young in 1972. But when Young became ambassador to the United […]
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 […]
