She was the first female architect in Georgia and the first woman in the South to receive formal architectural training. Henrietta Dozier was born in Fernandina, Florida, in 1872, and moved to Atlanta when she was 2 years old. Dozier studied Beaux-Arts classicism at the Pratt Institute in New York. At 27, she earned her […]
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 […]
She was one of Georgia’s most famous literary figures. Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah in 1925 and graduated from Georgia State College for Women. Then it was on to the University of Iowa, home to the famous Writers’ Workshop, where she rubbed elbows with some of America’s leading writers. Moving to New York, […]
Before Margaret Mitchell, before Flannery O’Connor, Georgia produced a female author who was just as famous in her day. Corra Harris was born in Elbert County in 1869. Her writing career began out of economic necessity because of her minister husband’s alcoholism and depression. Harris wrote a letter to a New York magazine defending the […]
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, […]
She gave the performance of a lifetime in just her third film—and won an Oscar at 27. Joanne Woodward was born in Thomasville and grew up there and in Marietta. She loved movies, and in 1939 she and her mother attended the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. Woodward went to Louisiana State University […]
She was born in Eatonton in 1944 and at age 8 she was blinded in one eye by a BB gun fired by her brother, a traumatic event that crippled her self-confidence. She was eventually homecoming queen and valedictorian at Butler-Baker High School. But it was Alice Walker’s searing literary portraits of African-American life and […]
She lived by two rules: love what you do and eat right. It clearly worked for Leila Denmark. At the age of 103, she was the oldest practicing pediatrician in the country when she retired in 2001. Born in Bulloch County in 1898, Denmark made a bold choice for a woman at that time – […]
Women’s struggle for equality took a major step forward on this day in 1836. The first college in the world to grant degrees to women was chartered in Macon — an incredibly progressive idea for the times. Now known as Wesleyan College, it began as Georgia Female College after a group of Macon businessmen raised […]
What better gift than freedom? That’s what William and Ellen Craft gave each other, and celebrated this day in 1848. Their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, was exactly what they did. The Crafts were slaves in Macon who devised a daring and dangerous plan of escape. Ellen was the daughter of her white […]
