In a half century of teaching, Moses Waddel taught some of the most influential and important statesmen of the 19th century. Born in North Carolina in 1770, he began teaching at age 14. He moved to Georgia briefly but left to attend Hampden Sydney College in Virginia and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. After […]
One of the most popular preachers in England and America in the 18th century first arrived in Savannah on this day in 1738. George Whitefield was born in 1714 in England, and educated at Oxford, where he met John and Charles Wesley; together they were the first leaders of the Methodist movement. After the Wesleys […]
Mixing religion and politics worked out well for Henry McNeal Turner. Free-born in South Carolina in 1834, he was educated by white attorneys at a firm where he did janitorial work. Drawn to preaching, he led revivals in Macon, Athens, and Augusta. He pastored a church in Washington D.C., where he met Republican congressmen Charles […]
He wrote the section of Georgia’s constitution that guarantees religious liberty to its citizens. Jesse Mercer was born in North Carolina in 1769 and migrated to Georgia with his family as a child. A preacher’s son, he was ordained a Baptist minister and was a gifted preacher who pastored seven churches in his life, several […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lyman Hall was an ordained minister, a doctor and one of three Georgians to sign the Declaration of Independence, quite a resume for a man born in Connecticut in 1747. Hall was from old New England stock and graduated from Yale. He abandoned the congregational ministry for medicine and moved South, eventually settling in Georgia […]