His was a voice of moderation during one of the South’s most racially divisive periods. Ralph McGill was born in Tennessee in 1898. His sports columns in the Nashville Banner caught the eye of Atlanta Constitution editor Clark Howell, who hired McGill in 1929. By 1941, McGill was the paper’s editor, and over the next […]
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 […]
He was 14 when he saw Jackie Robinson play, and knew he wanted to play major league baseball. There were few better. Henry Louis Aaron was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1934. During a 23-year career with the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves and the Milwaukee Brewers, Aaron won the National League’s Most Valuable Player and […]
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. […]
Few presidential acts have had more impact upon the arc of history than the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on this day in 1863. It transformed a war for union into a crusade for human freedom. Emancipation had not initially been a U.S. war aim. As the Union death toll mounted however, support […]
She was one of the first prominent white Southerners to denounce segregation, and she was a controversial figure all her life. Lillian Smith was born in Florida in 1897 and moved to Georgia as a teenager. After a stint in China, she began to speak out against Jim Crow, calling segregation “spiritual lynching.” From her […]
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. considered it one of his few failures. The Albany Movement in the early 1960s had a simple but formidable objective: the desegregation of an entire community, from bus stations to lunch counters. A coalition mobilized thousands and brought national attention to southwest Georgia, particularly after Dr. King’s arrival in December […]
The Civil Rights movement boasted many heroes; some, sadly, unsung. Thomas Brewer was born in Alabama in 1894, and earned a medical degree at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. In 1920, Brewer moved to Columbus, Georgia, opened a practice and became a leader in the thriving black professional community. He helped establish the Columbus chapter […]
If there was a Mt. Rushmore for civil rights icons, Andrew Young would be on it. But his achievements go well beyond civil rights: Young has served as congressman, United Nations ambassador and mayor of Atlanta. Andrew Jackson Young Jr. was born in New Orleans in 1932. He became involved in the civil rights movement […]
He was the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta in 1929 as Michael Luther King. His father later changed their names. He grew up on Auburn Avenue near Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his grandfather and father were pastors. King graduated from Morehouse College, became […]
