20th Century

It was a giant step forward for Georgia women on this day in 1922.   Viola Napier of Bibb County and Bessie Kempton Crowell of Fulton County became the first women elected to the General Assembly. They hit the milestone only two years after the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote.  Napier was […]

While $3.5 billion in sales a year, is not, as the saying has it, chicken feed, Truett Cathy’s family-owned corporation feeds a lot of people a lot of chicken. Born in Atlanta in 1921, Cathy came up during the Great Depression. With a deep spirituality and a determined work ethic, he opened the Dwarf Grill, […]

The women of Georgia finally got the right to vote on this day in 1921 when Governor Thomas Hardwick signed the act that made it official. The suffrage movement had been slow to gain ground in the South. Many women joined men in arguing that there was no more important job than wife and mother, […]

The man known as “the Georgia Peach” reached a major milestone on this day in 1921. At age 34, baseball great and Georgia native Ty Cobb got career hit number 3000, the youngest player to reach that plateau. Cobb was born in Narrows, Georgia, in 1886 and grew up in nearby Royston. He joined the […]

The greatest college football player ever? Bear Bryant said he was. Even if he did play for Georgia. Charley Trippi was born in Pennsylvania in 1920. The young athlete caught the attention of a former Georgia Bulldog who ran a Coca-Cola bottling plant near Trippi’s home. He offered Trippi a scholarship to play football at […]

Star Trek only ran three years, but you can’t kill it with a phaser. Its characters are immortal as well. They have lived long, and prospered. One of them was DeForest Kelley, born in Atlanta in 1920 and a graduate of Decatur Boys High in 1938. After a hitch in the Army Air Corps in […]

He won the first Heisman Trophy ever awarded to a southern college football player. But Frank Sinkwich might never have played at the University of Georgia if a recruiter hadn't stopped for gas. Sinkwich was born in 1920 in Pennsylvania and grew up in Youngstown, Ohio.  UGA assistant coach Bill Hartman was recruiting another player […]

Organize and reform was Mary Ellen Peters’ mantra long before unions adopted it. Nellie Peters was born in Atlanta in 1851. After her husband died, she became an active reformer. With seven children of her own, she was a fierce advocate of free kindergartens and hospitals, compulsory education, diversified farming, and the enforcement of child […]

Americans may love individual liberties, but there is a social engineering streak in some of us a mile wide—and when reformers can’t persuade, they try to pass laws. Prohibition in the United States goes back to the 1820s and 30s, during the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical Protestants organized both temperance […]

He was one Southern governor who chose not to stand in the schoolhouse door. Ernest Vandiver was born in Canon, Georgia, in 1918 and graduated from the University of Georgia before serving as a bomber pilot in World War II. Elected governor in 1958, Vandiver cleaned up the state’s image after the scandals and corruption […]