When four African Americans came to Atlanta’s Bitsy Grant Tennis Center on this day in 1961, they found a sign waiting for them: “Closed for Repairs.” White Atlantans fiercely resisted desegregating the city’s parks, pools, and golf courses. City buses had always been contested terrain, but Atlanta’s recreational facilities had by long custom been “Whites […]

One hundred seventy-six years after it was chartered, Georgia’s flagship university admitted its first black students on this day in 1961. Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter applied to the University of Georgia in the summer of 1959 but were told that all dorms were full. They re-applied every semester thereafter and got the same response. […]

Vocabulary – Desegregation in Atlanta Fiercely Adjective furiously eager or intense Resisted Verb To refuse to give in to something, to oppose and stand firm against somebody or something Desegregating Verb To eliminate racial segregation Contested Verb To challenge or question something Terrain Noun Ground or a piece of land seen in terms of its […]

Vocabulary – Desegregation of UGA Flagship Noun The most important or prestigious among a group of similar and related things. Admitted Verb To allow somebody or something entrance or access Applied Adjective To make a formal, usually written, request for something. In this case to formally ask to attend a university Dorms Noun A room […]

Learn More – Desegregation in Atlanta Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Donald L. Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1993). Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga […]

Learn More – Desegregation of UGA Robert A. Pratt, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). Trillin, Calvin. An Education in Georgia; The Integration of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes. New York, Viking Press, 1964 Cohen, Robert 1996. “Two, Four, Six Eight, We Don’t […]

Daily Activities – Desegregation in Atlanta The daily activities created for each of the Today in Georgia History segments are designed to meet the Georgia Performance Standards for Reading Across the Curriculum, and Grade Eight: Georgia Studies. For each date, educators can choose from three optional activities differentiated for various levels of student ability. Each […]

Daily Activities – Desegregation of UGA The daily activities created for each of the Today in Georgia History segments are designed to meet the Georgia Performance Standards for Reading Across the Curriculum, and Grade Eight: Georgia Studies. For each date, educators can choose from three optional activities differentiated for various levels of student ability. Each […]

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” The cartoonist who gave us that famous quote was born on this day in 1913 in Philadelphia. Walt Kelly worked as a Disney animator before launching Pogo in 1948, the comic strip set in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. It ran nationally for 25 years and was the […]

He was valedictorian of his high school class but the University of Georgia wouldn’t let him in. Hamilton Holmes was born in 1941 in Atlanta, the grandson of a doctor. After Holmes’ 1959 graduation from Atlanta’s Henry McNeal Turner High School, Jesse Hill of the NAACP recruited him and fellow Turner grad Charlayne Hunter to […]