Author Archives: Jamil Zainaldin

This week guest contributor DAVE SCHECHTER, a veteran journalist, tells the story of the Leo Frank case on the centennial of Leo Frank’s lynching.

It has been said that an Atlanta busy in the present and building for the future sometimes leaves behind its past.

August 17 is the centennial of an ignominious piece of history, the hanging of Leo Max Frank in a Marietta woods — if not the only, then at least the best-known lynching of a Jew in the United States. Nothing marks the site along a forgettable (other than the “Big Chicken”) stretch of Roswell Road near Frey’s Gin Road where vigilantes hanged Frank after kidnapping him from the state prison in Milledgeville.

To call Atlanta an international city is to use the parlance of the day. Cosmopolitan, metropolitan, home of distinguished higher education institutions and leading cultural centers and sites, we daily speak of Atlanta in the world, and the world in Atlanta.

But to a degree that we often underestimate, Georgia and Atlanta have always operated on a national and even world stage. We are products of each other.

This week guest contributor KWESI J. DEGRAFT-HANSON, a landscape architect in Atlanta, unearths the place and the people of the nation’s largest slave auction.

To recoup losses suffered in gambling and stock market speculation, Pierce Mease Butler auctioned off 429 enslaved persons in Savannah on March 2 and 3, 1859. It was the single largest slave auction in recorded U.S. history.

Butler and his brother’s widow, Gabriella Butler, owned a rice plantation on Butler Island, near Darien, and a nearby cotton plantation, which were worked by 919 enslaved persons. In February 1859 he had the 919 enslaved persons appraised; their value — around $500,000.

We are accustomed to witnessing cataclysmic events of all kinds. These include not only the facts of shocking violence in the news, but natural catastrophes, too. For Hollywood, world-ending calamities are good for business. Though the mind reels, the ebb and flow of life motors on.

Life, if we let it, can become a pressure cooker. We never seem satisfied by what we have or where we’ve gotten. There’s one more rung on the ladder to climb, one more recognition we think we deserve, one more promotion or accolade. Some of us — sometimes it seems like our entire popular culture — are like characters in a video game or reality show, dodging challenges as we graduate to the next level of play. But where is it we have arrived when all is said and done?

Sometimes answers come in very small packages, like short stories or novels. The art of Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor lies in her ability to condense the heaviest of thoughts about life and purpose into the commonplace of stories. Last week the U. S. Postal Service issued a Flannery O’Connor “Forever” postage stamp. It is an occasion well worth noting, not only for the literary world but for the reason that many others now will discover and read her for the first time.

This week guest contributors REN and HELEN DAVIS, Atlanta-based writers and photographers, look at the many public outdoor spaces we have in Georgia and the Depression-era investment that created or preserved them.

Seventy years ago, the nation lost the president who led it out of the depths of the Great Depression and to near certain victory in World War II. When Franklin D. Roosevelt collapsed at his Warm Springs cottage, Georgians also lost a valued friend and neighbor. From the time of his arrival in 1924 to seek therapy for polio in the soothing springs and on through his years in the White House, this scion of wealth and New York aristocracy was transformed by his day-to-day experiences among the people of Warm Springs and Pine Mountain. All Americans, in turn, were forever changed by him.

A few weeks ago, my Georgia Humanities colleagues had the pleasure of hosting Dr. William Adams, the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), for the day; not in a decade had an NEH chairman visited our state. Our plan for the day was to expose him to the good work being done by Georgia’s scholars and academic libraries.

Our theme was “humanities in the public square,” which is also a programming priority of Chairman Adams’s young administration (he was approved by the Senate in 2014). But first, let’s look at that awkward word, humanities.

In 1978, in an office on the first floor of a century-old building at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, David Van Tassel, an accomplished U.S. historian, hatched an idea: what if children came together each year to celebrate the art and craft of history?

Van Tassel was familiar with the science fair, a brilliant idea for introducing school students to the methodology of scientific research via competitive projects judged for their quality and significance. He was also concerned about a lessening of emphasis on history and the humanities in the schools, a concern that some of us continue to have to this day.

This week guest contributor JAMES ZAINALDIN, amateur birder and Harvard University doctoral student, talks about bird-watching in the Atlanta area.

Believe it or not, bird-watching is fast becoming one of America’s favorite pastimes. Surveys estimate that some 50 million Americans identify as bird-watchers, and this number has been growing rapidly since the middle of the twentieth century. There is something special about this “watching” of bird-watching, a subtle pleasure that only nature can give to us: you can’t own wild birds; money and influence won’t attract them; only patience, concentration, and perseverance count.