He was the other signer from Georgia of the U.S. Constitution. William Few was born in 1748 in Maryland and moved to Richmond County near Augusta in the 1770s. Few was an active Patriot during the American Revolution. He served in the military, in the state legislature, and as a delegate to the 1777 Georgia […]
The white South’s opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the 1950s was known as “Massive Resistance,” and while Georgia’s reaction wasn’t as violent as other states, it was no less defiant. On this day in 1956, Governor Marvin Griffin addressed a joint session of the General Assembly and urged lawmakers to invoke the doctrine of interposition […]
The poll tax, a bulwark of the Jim Crow era, was one of many roadblocks thrown up to keep African-Americans from exercising their right to vote. Although the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1870, guaranteed former male slaves the right to vote, the poll tax, which all voters had to pay was […]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on this day in 1882, but perhaps no other president besides Jimmy Carter had such strong Georgia ties. Stricken with polio in 1921, Roosevelt made his first visit to Warm Springs three years later. It became his second home. He founded what is now the […]
Theodore Roosevelt’s great-great-grandfather was Georgia’s first chief executive. Archibald Bulloch was born in Charleston in 1730 and moved to Georgia in 1758. When the revolutionary crisis began, Bulloch became an outspoken leader of the Liberty Party that championed American rights. He served as president of Georgia’s Provincial Congress that met in 1775 to address the […]
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” So said James Madison, and after the revolution, Georgians realized the fledgling republic would survive only with educated citizens. In 1784, the General Assembly set aside 40,000 acres for a state […]
The son of sharecroppers in Webster County became one of the longest serving U.S. senators in Georgia history. Walter F. George graduated from Mercer Law School and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. He supported early New Deal programs but broke with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over his attempt to pack the Supreme […]
Georgia’s first African-American congressman was born a slave. Jefferson Franklin Long was born in Alabama in 1836. His master sold him to a man in Macon. Long taught himself to read and write while setting type for the Macon newspaper. Long attended Macon’s African Methodist Episcopal Church and was deeply influenced by Henry McNeal Turner, […]
It took the Supreme Court to seat Julian Bond in the Georgia Legislature. Born in Nashville in 1940, graduated from a Quaker school in Pennsylvania, he came to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College. Bond led nonviolent protests that helped integrate Atlanta lunch counters, theaters and parks. In 1960, he was one of the founders of […]
James Jackson was a pugnacious politician with a fiery temper. Born in England in 1756, he came to Savannah as a teen and fought in the American Revolution. Jackson served in the first Congress under the new U.S. Constitution, and supported Thomas Jefferson’s fledgling Democratic-Republicans against Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. Jackson was in the U.S. Senate […]
