Author Archives: Jamil Zainaldin

In this column, members of Georgia Humanities and their colleagues take turns discussing Georgia’s history and culture, and other topics that matter. Through different voices, we hear different stories. This week guest contributor and artist Sal Brownfield talks about his series of paintings of women — and one man — who have been affected by breast […]

This week, guest columnists HARVEY NEWMAN and ANDREA YOUNG, of Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, discuss a new documentary focusing on Andrew Young’s legacy in Atlanta.

On two evenings this month, January 7 and 14, at 8:00 pm, Georgia Public Broadcasting will show parts one and two of Andrew Young’s Making of Modern Atlanta, a documentary film focusing on Young’s leadership. For longtime residents of Atlanta, the two-hour documentary will tell many stories with which they may be familiar.

The year was 1933. The stock market crash four years earlier had triggered a titanic wave of economic collapse. Left in its wake was an aptly named Great Depression. Among the challenges facing the nation, electrification was no small matter. In the 1930s, cities were almost completely electrified, with 90 percent of urban residents having access to electricity; the contrast to the rest of the country was stark, with approximately 90 percent of rural Americans living without electricity.

This week, guest columnist GARY HAUK of Emory University tells the story of the school’s beginning.   

The brother of a Methodist bishop, Atlanta’s Asa Candler pledged $1 million to establish a Methodist university in the South that would rival the one founded by robber barons in Nashville.

The warrior’s homecoming is an important chapter of war — maybe even the most important of all.

A large bell hangs in the clock tower overlooking the campus of Morris Brown College. Its inscription reads, in part, “Dedicated to the Education of Youth, Without Regard to Sex, Race or Color.” Today, its largely empty campus stands as a testament to a proud past, a challenging present, and an uncertain future, not only for this one institution but for all historically black colleges.

This week, guest columnist THOMAS A. SCOTT, professor emeritus of history at Kennesaw State University, tells the story of James Carmichael, a business leader who paved the way for the significance of the Atlanta region’s business and industry sectors. It’s not fashionable today to praise the moderates of the World War II and postwar era.

Remembering an Atlanta historian, professor, radio storyteller, and intrepid city bike rider. Around the city, Cliff was a familiar sight as he coursed through its downtown and back streets on his bike, a sturdy peddler with helmet, grey beard, a flashing smile, and a hand-wave that announced his passage.

This week guest contributor JOHN INSCOE, a University of Georgia professor, discusses recent autobiographical works that reflect diverse experiences.

What do the following share in common: a fugitive slave couple from Macon, the first black supervisor at Lockheed-Georgia, a Puerto Rican native who’s one of Georgia’s most distinguished writers, an African American physician who became one of the nation’s leading public health officials, Jimmy Carter’s White House chief of staff, and an Emory professor who’s just served two terms as the nation’s Poet Laureate?

This week guest contributor JANET RECHTMAN, a senior fellow at the Fanning Institute and a Foxfire board member, offers lessons on how an organization can survive a disaster.

Since 1966, Foxfire students, teachers, staff, and volunteers have compiled a history of the people, communities, and traditions of southern Appalachia. Readers of the Foxfire books made the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center a must-see destination for visitors from all over the world.

It is easy to forget the past. In the urgency of the present moment, we humans seem destined to do so. But there is irony in that tendency: to neglect the past is also to misunderstand why things are as they are. And sometimes, tragic consequences can follow.

One way not to forget is to seek out the stories of heroes whose lives are lessons to us, another urge we humans share. We are especially drawn to men and women who live lives of excellence — indeed whose lives help define what it means to live well, to live right, to live with distinction and greatness.

This week guest contributor David B. Parker, professor of history at Kennesaw State University, takes a look at archivist Ruth Blair and the importance of county histories.

In 1929 the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution urging counties to compile their histories in honor of the state’s upcoming bicentennial (in 1933, 200 years after the founding of Georgia in 1733).

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional in 1954, the hellhounds of racial hatred were unleashing a torrent of threats to any and all who dared challenge the South’s segregation.

Residents of a southern city with a reputation for pragmatic government and a relish for seizing the main chance, Atlantans could justly describe their home place as “too busy to hate.” When they awoke on the morning of October 12, 1958, they were confronted with an event that had the power to change everything.

This week, guest columnist TODD GROCE, president and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society, looks at how we understand the past.

How can we square our supposedly poor understanding of history with this keen interest in the future of historical symbols and the larger discussion about the role they play in our contemporary lives? If we are ignorant of history, why do we care so much about it?

After the aborted Bay of Pigs operation. . . . After the nuclear brinkmanship that followed the discovery of nuclear missiles in Cuba. . . . After President John F. Kennedy fell before an assassin’s bullet, rattling the nation to its core. . . . President Lyndon B. Johnson reminded America of something it had never lost and never would: its imagination, its humanness, and its capacity to aspire to the heights of learning.

This week guest contributors JENNIFER DICKEY and CATHERINE LEWIS, history professors at Kennesaw State University, discuss the history of the Governor’s Mansion and its occupants.

As he was leaving an event at the Governor’s Mansion in Ansley Park in 1963, C&S Bank president Mills Lane was nearly struck on the head by a stone that broke loose from the porch. Lane had long been an advocate for a new Governor’s Mansion to replace the house in Ansley Park that had served as home for Georgia’s governors since 1924; the close call with the falling stone was, for him, the last straw.

The AJC Decatur Book Festival happened almost two weeks ago, but its impact for the tens of thousands who attended lingers, at least based on my own experience. The nation’s largest independent event of its kind, the DBF each year establishes a new high-water mark — at least based on the enthusiasm of many who attend. It is a booklover’s convention, bringing back old fans and attracting new ones each year.

This week guest contributor BLAKE LELAND, poet and Georgia Tech professor, explores the transplant experience of a former Yankee.

Having read Jamil Zainaldin’s recent columns tracing some of the historical links between New England and Georgia, it occurred to me that as a native of Massachusetts making my home here in Georgia since 1988, I am one of those links myself — not so significant as W. E. B. DuBois, Prince Hall, or Old Ironsides, but nevertheless a little knot in the network of connections between North and South.

As part of the run-up to this year’s AJC-Decatur Book Festival on Labor Day weekend, guest contributor DAREN WANG, executive director of the AJC-Decatur Book Festival, encourages readers to explore new genres, new writers, and new forms altogether.

We are curious and we are strange and we are unpredictable. We need to cherish and nurture our unpredictability. We are more than all the algorithms that Amazon and Apple and Google and Spotify can ever write.

Previously, I wrote of a summer family vacation week in New England — Massachusetts specifically — and the intertwining stories of Georgia and the Bay State that we discovered.

This wasn’t so surprising, since both places share a common history: as members of the original 13 English colonies, having fought each other when the concept of the Union came under attack, and having joined each other to fight in two world wars. But our shared history can sometimes be obscured as we hear the differences between the North and South emphasized.