Author Archives: Jamil Zainaldin

Love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. We know these as essences of life. They are also at the heart of the stories told in the poetry and plays of the great, late August Wilson (1945-2005).

He won two Pulitzer Prizes for drama, and among his best-known works are Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Set largely in the black working-class community of his native Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his plays commemorate the individuality of his characters, and in so doing bridge the differences among races to create a mutual recognition.

October is Georgia Archives Month, an occasion for commemorating the importance of preserving and documenting Georgia’s as well as the nation’s history.

The 2014 theme of Georgia Archives Month, “Sweet Tea and Southern Breezes,” sponsored by the Society of Georgia Archivists, evokes “the memories of friendship and community documented in archival collections across the state.”

About 75 miles from downtown Atlanta and about 12 miles south of Rome is one of the most beautiful settings anywhere: Cave Spring. Taking its name from an aquifer that surfaces through a limestone cave, this town of about 1,200 sits in beautiful Vann’s Valley of Floyd County in north Georgia.

The community was settled in the late 1820s as migrants from Augusta encroached on land still occupied by the Cherokee. Drawn by the gold rush of 1829 but also by the fertile valleys, early residents showed themselves to be industrious settlers whose priorities of learning, productivity, worship, and service would shape future generations.

Without a doubt, Winston Churchill is one of the most important political figures of the 20th century — or of any time. A man who withstood ostracism after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of World War I and who entered a “political wilderness” (again) in the 1930s owing to his controversial positions on English monetary and colonial policies…

“Georgia on my mind” —  that would be an apt description for the art of the great Georgia artist Lamar Dodd, born September 22, 1909. According to New Georgia Encyclopedia author and Dodd biographer William U. Eiland, a reviewer of a 1932 New York exhibition of Dodd’s watercolors and oil paintings described his work as having “not one scene of the Scottish moors with their purple heather. . . . Not one scene of the fountains of Rome! . . . Nothing of Paris or London or Athens or Pompeii. But Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.” The critic was hailing this new “regional” American spirit of Dodd’s with both delight and relief.

Like other great Georgia artists (Johnny Mercer, Ray Charles, Benny Andrews, Flannery O’Connor), Dodd took much of his inspiration from his home state of Georgia, but unlike those greats, his name is not always as well remembered. It deserves to be.

In March of this year, about 100 people came together in Tifton, Georgia, from all parts of the state and the country to commemorate the memory of a lost, invisible past that was now found. Not long before, most had no idea of their connection to it.

The occasion was a special event convened by the Georgia Museum of Agriculture. The centerpiece was an exhibition on child labor in Georgia in the early 20th century, the mills who employed children, and the story of a single family: that of Catherine Young. To understand why this story is so remarkable to all who attended the event, we need go a back a century in time.

Neighbors Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner opened their first Waffle House in Avondale Estates, in DeKalb County, in 1955. Open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the restaurant featured its namesake — of course, the waffle — as well as eggs, grits, hashbrowns (a specialty), burgers, and T-bone steak. Initially restricted to the Deep South, Waffle House today operates in 25 states and is America’s second-largest family-style restaurant (after Denny’s). With its “retro-style dining room where customers can watch their food being prepared,” writes journalist Chris Starr, “the look and quality of the restaurant has never really changed.”

That’s the official story from the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The unofficial story is the one every regular customer knows in his or her own way, which is why that yellow sign is a southern icon.

Modern education reform is part of a national effort to promote student achievement. A thoroughly modern idea, it grew in response to the 1950s Cold War race between the United States and the Soviet Union for worldwide technology dominance. If one could point to a symbol of that era, probably it would be the 1957 launch of the satellite “Sputnik,” a threatening image in the American mind.

Indeed Sputnik not only launched a space race but changed forever how we talk about education. Certainly the space race unlocked the U.S. treasury in pursuit of new national priorities. And near the top of this list was education — at every level.

In 2014 the city is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. Certainly most of us are familiar with the devastation that Sherman visited on Atlanta and the surrounding area in his campaign to deal a lasting blow to the Confederacy.

Less familiar, and almost entirely unknown until recent years, thanks to the work of the late University of Georgia historian Thomas G. Dyer (see Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta), are the circumstances of the city’s surrender and the composition of the surrender delegation.

By Laura McCarty, vice president of the Georgia Humanities Council. She is a guest columnist for “Jamil’s Georgia” this week.

Music- and film-making are thriving businesses in Georgia now, but Georgia native Johnny Mercer — writer of such memorable songs as “Glow-Worm” and “Jeepers Creepers,” which were wildly popular in their day — successfully blended both during his long career.

A recent book by New Georgia Encyclopedia author Glenn T. Eskew, Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World (published by the University of Georgia Press), explores the life and global legacy of Mercer — one of the most prolific, successful, and popular songwriters of the 20th century.

Earlier I wrote about the migration of Godfrey and Julia Barnsley from Savannah to the mountains, where Godfrey Barnsley built their dream estate, “the Woodlands” — not as a plantation, but in the style of an Italianate manor sustained by the countryside. Yet the existence of Barnsley’s dream house was dependent on his work as an international cotton agent that tied his fate and that of his family to the cotton industry.

Thus, the war of secession that engulfed Georgia came in time to the Woodlands. In May 1864 Union and Confederate troops skirmished on the grounds of the Barnsley estate as General James B. McPherson passed through Woodlands on his way to Atlanta (where he would die two months later). Seeing the manor, its gardens, fields, and vineyards, he was overwhelmed: “This is a little piece of heaven itself.”

Last week I wrote of the genesis of Barnsley Gardens, of Godfrey and Julia Barnsley’s decision to relocate from Savannah, where Godfrey was engaged in the cotton trade as a broker, to the mountains of pre-Civil War north Georgia. After a three-week journey by wagon, they settled on more than 3,000 acres of fertile land amid undulating hills, natural springs, and forest that was formerly occupied by the Cherokee. They named their estate “Woodlands.”

Their first task (with their servants and hired local help) was to begin building cabins and wood structures that would be their temporary housing. Barnsley, who seemed always to have a plan, acquired a steam-driven sawmill for lumbering and a kiln for making brick. While the challenges were obvious and included “roaming wild animals” and “wolves so numerous,” there was also nature’s bounty.

For me, an important thread in the worldwide narrative of human and civil rights is the story of the Albany Movement, which I’ve discussed over the last few weeks. It is a story — or more properly, stories — involving a place whose ground we stand upon.

Almost 400 years ago, traders brought Africans to the first English colony in the New World, Virginia, where tobacco plantations and slavery grew hand in hand, and spread. Four of the young nation’s first five presidents were Virginians who owned slaves, even as they trumpeted liberty as a natural and universal human right.

More than 400 years of slavery transitioned to a post-Reconstruction segregation policy that continued to thwart and distort the lives of millions of American citizens who lived under these laws.

Before the advent of federal civil rights legislation (1964-65), the Albany Movement found its sustenance in song. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, workers Cordell Reagon and Charles Sherrod learned “freedom songs” during the student sit-ins in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee in 1960.

Their Mississippi Freedom Rider experience in the summer of 1961 added new material to their repertoire. When they got to Albany, Reagon and Sherrod taught freedom songs to high school and college students in the NAACP Youth Council.

After the arrest and jailing over a six-week period of 755 peaceful protestors, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for whom the Albany Movement had become a personal mission, the protest leaders announced just days before the 1961 Christmas holiday that the city had agreed to begin formal talks with Albany Movement leaders — a development that had been one of the movement’s goals.

The city released King from jail. He returned to Atlanta, anticipating more good news in this season of good tidings.

By early January, however, it became evident that the leaders had been fooled.

In my previous column, I talked about the efforts of SNCC Freedom Riders to conduct a voter registration drive and to instruct locals in direct nonviolent action in southwest Georgia’s commercial hub, Albany.

The 1961 campaign, which in the beginning involved two local black churches, began with 9 students who attempted to integrate the Trailways bus terminal on November 1, 1961, and were warned away by police. A week later a core of black civic organizations, including the local NAACP chapter, met and agreed upon a campaign whose goal was nothing less than integrating the entire community.

Aware that nothing like this had ever been attempted in the South or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter, they dubbed their campaign the “Albany Movement.”

In the last column, I wrote about the Freedom Rides of the summer of 1961, testing the compliance of the Supreme Court’s ruling that banned segregation in buses and terminals involved in interstate travel. The opening legs of that journey, in Birmingham, in Montgomery, and outside Anniston, Alabama, witnessed violent attacks on the riders.

But that did not stop hundreds of others who boarded buses north of the Mason-Dixon line, integrating the South’s roadways and bus terminals as they went. Also making the journey that summer were two men, one a minister and recent graduate of Virginia Union College — Charles Sherrod — and the other a Nashville native who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a full-time organizer at the age of 17 — Cordell Reagon.

Earlier I wrote of the anniversaries this year of some significant events in the American civil rights story, moments that bear discussing as we welcome the long-awaited opening of the Center for Civil and Human Rights here in Atlanta. And I began describing how small victories in the civil rights struggle led to real change and to more struggle, paving the way for a remarkable moment in the history of the movement as well as the state: that of the Albany Movement.

Two years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court (which made the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional), the surprise victory of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott catapulted into international notoriety Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the icon of a community deep in the South whose courage in the face of threats to life and limb radiated commitment and strong leadership.