Author Archives: Jamil Zainaldin

We have grown accustomed to seeing front-page news concerning K-12 public education in Georgia and its progress (or lack of progress), but some of us may wonder what is prompting all the attention. Is the public school system “broken?” Are we falling farther behind the rest of the nation, and the world, in our educational “race to the top?”

Education has always been on our national mind. One of the very first legislative acts produced by our young national government was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The ordinance’s most astonishing provision involved education. Free public schools, which previously existed only in New England, were mandated in every township of the new territory.

Georgia’s musical influence looms large, extending far beyond its borders. The examples are legendary, including Johnny Mercer, Ray Charles, Brenda Lee, James Brown, Otis Redding. What is the nature of this place that nurtures such powerful roots?

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, an annual event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., used the term roots music in the early 1970s to describe “folk” or “old-time” music that combined singing with acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle and accordion.

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s heritage extends back to Georgia’s antebellum planter elite, and includes a governor, judge, state supreme court justice, and founder of the University of Georgia Law School (not to mention a county named in honor of her family).

The Lumpkins also contributed sons to the Confederacy’s war effort, and like their planter neighbors, experienced the war’s aftermath as a personal and economic catastrophe.

Two spirited Georgia women of the post-Civil War era are remarkable for the clarity of their voices, their roots in the state, and their achievements. If in some ways they are alike, they are also profoundly different.

Eliza Frances (“Fanny”) Andrews was born in 1840 in Wilkes County; Kathryn Du Pre Lumpkin was born in 1897 in neighboring Oglethorpe County. Each benefited from the prominence of their families.

The urge to examine and understand is what Socrates recognized as intuitively human, and worthy of encouragement. For self-examination is a confirmation that we are living and breathing and thinking beings. And that’s the great conversation that the arts and humanities invite us into.

We in Georgia are engaged in a national conversation on the value of the arts and humanities. One of the leaders in this dialogue is Wayne Clough, the former head of Georgia Tech and now the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

The steps leading up to the nation’s disunion in 1861 were many. If we are looking for one of the significant cracks between North and South that foreshadowed the irreconcilable chasm to come, we might look no further than the tiny community of Oxford, Georgia, about 35 miles southeast of Atlanta.

Bishop James Osgood Andrew, one of the first residents of Oxford, was a Methodist minister who practiced in South Carolina and North Carolina, and in the Augusta and Savannah circuits. In 1832, as a delegate to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, he was elected as a bishop.

“We are passing through one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world.”

With the Confederacy barely a month old, so began Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, in a speech in Savannah. This sesquicentennial season of the Civil War gives us an opportunity to explore the most devastating event in American history and one of the deadliest of all civil wars: more than 600,000 combatants died, leaving no American household untouched.

Pierce Mease Butler and Fanny Kemble had a tempestuous marriage and divorce, the effects of which passed on to their children and grandchildren — not unlike the separate regions of the nation where they lived.

Fanny Kemble was a brilliant Shakespearean actress and prolific writer, born to a London family famous for its performances before kings and queens.

Aaron Burr, Jefferson Davis, George Washington. Each man who passed through Georgia was following his own destiny; each was a traitor to those who held power and who had the resources to punish him.

Aaron Burr, prior to his election as vice president of the United States under Thomas Jefferson, had compiled an impressive record. Many considered him a brilliant lawyer as well as an able and strikingly handsome politician. And during the Revolutionary War he had distinguished himself for bravery and leadership.

It was Coca-Cola that first brought Robert Woodruff and President Eisenhower together in World War II, through the morale-boosting campaign to put a Coke in the hands of all military service personnel.

After the war, “Ike” enjoyed hunting quail at Ichauway Plantation as Woodruff’s guest. Thus, with Congress still intransigent, it was time for a personal intervention.

Today’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has deep roots in Georgia, not the least of which were the Depression-era efforts of a handful of medical practitioners, a university, and a philanthropist whose support made their work possible.

Next time you drive by the CDC, consider this: What does that imposing complex in the middle of metro Atlanta have to do with a tiny, remote county in southwest Georgia?

When the Great Depression hit Georgia in the late 1920s, most of its population barely noticed, given that the state's own economy still suffered from the ruin of the Civil War.

Sharecropping had become a way of life for many farmers, black and white. In addition to poverty and the plague of pellagra, there were also massive agricultural impediments due to large-scale land erosion, resulting from long-standing poor farming practices.

When we think of Cobb County today, a variety of impressions come to mind. Historically, its development is inseparable from the state’s as a whole. Yet we may not, however, associate Cobb County with a leading role in nuclear weapons delivery and cold war.

Around 1785, planters along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia began importing high-quality cotton from the West Indies and learned to successfully cultivate the crop that made Caribbean planters, merchants, and slave traders rich.

Thus began a critical development in the history of slavery in the United States.

What is the value of a liberal arts education today? Academics — especially in the humanities — are often the objects of public criticism, if not dismissal, because of the “irrelevance” of their work. How does a college student majoring in, say, history or literature find a job after graduation? One scholar’s career, however, can help us recast this question of relevance.

A horrific event in Atlanta’s past changed the course of civil and human rights in the United States. On Sept. 22, 1906, whites began rampaging through Atlanta’s downtown streets and continued for three days.

When it was over, as many as 25 to 40 African Americans were dead, while only two whites died.

Lindbergh can be credited for helping Atlanta develop a taste for aviation. On Oct. 11, 1927, Lindbergh was given a hero’s welcome by 20,000 people at Grant Field where Lind bergh called on Atlantans’ “good will” to be “generous” in their view of “passenger and freight air service” (yes, there would be costs) and to recognize that a new day was dawning for commercial aviation.

In 1923 a quiet and withdrawn 21-year-old college dropout rode his motorcycle from Florida to Sumter County, Georgia, just outside Americus. He had a dream to purchase a biplane, which were being sold in crates as surplus left over from World War I.

When Sherman began the Atlanta Campaign in the spring of 1864, his goal was to drive deep into the South and, in accordance with Union general Ulysses Grant’s instructions, engage Confederate general Joseph Johnston’s army. Grant's orders were “to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.”