Coastal Plain

What Georgian doesn't feel a tinge of pride every time we hear Ray Charles sing “Georgia on my Mind”?  It's Georgia's official state song, and maybe the reason it sounds especially soulful is that Charles was singing about home.  Born in Albany, Ray Charles Robinson later changed his name to avoid confusion with boxer “Sugar” […]

“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 was set in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. It ran nationally for 25 years and was […]

The good work of Habitat for Humanity can be traced back to a progressive religious leader born on this day in 1912. Clarence Jordan was born in Talbotton. After studying agriculture at the University of Georgia, he became an ordained Baptist minister. Believing that God regarded people of all races as equals, Jordan combined his […]

The first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction was a woman who never went to college. Caroline Miller was born in Waycross and published her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom in 1933. It won the Pulitzer the next year. While Miller worked every day as a housewife and raised three children, she […]

The rock of tradition versus the hard place of progress is an old Southern dilemma. John Donald Wade, born in Marshallville, knew it well. Wade’s deep Georgia roots ran back to his great grandfather, John Adam Treutlen, Georgia’s first governor. Teaching at Vanderbilt in the 1920s, Wade helped create one of the seminal books in […]

Long before “bloody Sunday” in Selma, Georgia had a much bloodier civil rights event – the Camilla Massacre. On this day in 1868, during Reconstruction, a political rally in Mitchell County resulted in about a dozen freedmen being killed and 30 other wounded. Georgia had just been readmitted to the Union, but blacks and whites […]

He is the only person in the United States ever to be executed for war crimes. Hartmann Heinrich Wirz –“Henry”—was born in Switzerland in 1823. He was practicing medicine in Louisiana when the Civil War began. Wirz was eventually assigned to the staff of General John Winder, who was in charge of Confederate prisoner of […]

One of the most notorious sites in American history, Andersonville Prison in southwest Georgia, accepted the first U.S. prisoners of war on this day in 1864. Andersonville — built to hold 10,000 prisoners — ended up holding three times that thanks to the halt of prisoner exchanges during Grant’s campaign in Virginia. Conditions were bad […]

Georgians, like all Americans, were deeply divided by the Civil War. On August 22, 1864, four men were executed in Brooks County for conspiring to plot a slave insurrection. The conspirators were a local white man, John Vickery, and three slaves: Nelson, George and Sam. They planned to seize weapons, secure the county seat, Quitman, […]

A man born a slave in Georgia was the first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Henry Ossian Flipper was born in Thomasville in 1856. After the Civil War, Henry graduated from West Point in 1877 and joined the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 10th Cavalry Regiment. At Fort Davis in […]