Search Results: women

She was the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia Legislature. Grace Towns Hamilton was born in Atlanta in 1907. She graduated from Atlanta University in 1927 before earning a masters degree in psychology from Ohio State. Hamilton taught college for the next decade before she was appointed executive director of the Atlanta Urban League […]

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 […]

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 […]

When America entered World War I, Georgia entered a new era in which the military began to loom large in our state. In 1917, Georgia already had five major federal military installations: Fort McPherson, south of Atlanta; Fort Oglethorpe near the Tennessee border; Augusta’s arsenal and Camp Hancock, and Fort Screven on Tybee Island. The […]

She is one of the strongest women in the world, becoming a national champion and Olympic medalist while still a teenager. Cheryl Haworth was born in Savannah and began lifting weights at age 13 to improve at softball. Her father took her to a gym, where she power-cleaned 110 pounds. She trained daily and began […]

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, […]

She was known as “Mother Russell,” the wife of the state’s chief justice and the mother of a U.S. Senator. Ina Dillard was born in Oglethorpe County in 1868. After attending the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens, she married a young Athens lawyer named Richard Russell. He became one of the first judges to serve […]

Southern benefactor she was, Southern belle she was not. She nurtured the oldest public art museum in the South. Mary Telfair was born in Augusta on this day in 1791, the daughter of Governor Edward Telfair. She was a child of wealth and privilege, educated in private northern schools. Telfair’s formidable intellect matched her independent […]

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 […]

World War II had a global impact and it transformed Georgia as well. Some 320,000 Georgians served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the war, and thousands of others, including historic numbers of women, served in wartime industries. The war brought an infusion of federal dollars into Georgia. Every major Georgia city housed a military […]