Her signature song was “I’m Sorry” but there was nothing sorry about the career of Brenda Lee…one of the first singers to be launched to stardom by the new medium of TV. She was born Brenda Mae Tarpley in Atlanta and grew up in Conyers and Lithonia. She won a talent show at age five […]
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 […]
She was an outspoken opponent of slavery who married one of the largest slaveholders in the South. Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was born in London in 1809 in a family of actors, and she became an established actress herself. In Philadelphia in 1832 she met and eventually married Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner with […]
An African-American with a best-selling novel — a book that was turned into a movie — that was unheard of in the America of the late 1940s. Yet Frank Yerby did just that. Born in Augusta in 1916 to racially mixed parents, Yerby, all his life, had trouble being accepted in either black or white […]
A man who killed a political opponent in a duel nearly became the first president from Georgia, long before Jimmy Carter. William Crawford began his political career in 1803 as a state legislator from Oglethorpe County. Even though he killed a political enemy in a duel in 1802, Crawford’s political star kept rising, with service […]
John Wesley lost his labor of love when he came to Georgia. The founder of the Methodist Church was born in England in 1703, becoming a strict man of God who spread the faith throughout England and America. Ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church in his mid-20s, Wesley and his brother Charles studied […]
“Moon River,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Accentuate the Positive” — Savannah native John Herndon Mercer wrote those songs and a thousand more like them, and his songs are some of the most popular of all time. In a career that spanned nearly 50 years, Mercer co-founded Capitol Records, wrote for Broadway musicals, and was nominated for 19 […]
Known affectionately as the “Mouth of the South, he created a TV and sports empire that dramatically altered the media landscape. Robert Edward “Ted” Turner was born in Cincinnati in 1938. When he was nine, his family moved to Savannah. Turner took over his father’s billboard company after his father’s suicide and began expanding the […]
A Georgia native founded the most influential black newspaper of the 20th century. Robert Sengstacke Abbott was born on St. Simon’s island in 1868 and raised in Savannah. He attended law school in Chicago. When Abbott couldn’t find a job as a lawyer, he turned to journalism and founded the Chicago Defender. Within a decade […]
He was one of only three people inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. Robert Lee “Bobby” Dodd was a four-sport star at the University of Tennessee and was an All-American tailback playing football for legendary coach Robert Neyland. After graduation, Dodd took a job as assistant […]
