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Not many people realize that the proposed health care reforms of the Clinton administration and President Obama’s national healthcare plan have roots in the term of a former African American Secretary of Health and Human Services who served under a Republican president.

That information is only one of the revelations to be found in Breaking Ground: My Life in Medicine (University of Georgia Press, 2014), coauthored by Dr. Louis W. Sullivan and David Chanoff.

This commencement address was delivered by Jamil Zainaldin at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, on May 3, 2014.

This is an important day for graduating seniors. It marks the completion of the requirements for a bachelor’s degree. You are about to walk out the doors of this college and into the waiting arms of the world.

And what kind of world is that? Let’s take a quick survey. First, the difficult part: we have poverty, here and abroad. We have war. We have various kinds of inequalities and unfairness. Today we have competition — plenty of competition — in the world marketplace, and that brings its own kind of pressure to bear on U.S. companies and workers.

There’s good news, too, about our world. We’ve experienced in recent years amazing breakthroughs in science, medicine, and public health. And we are seeing great strides in human rights and equality that have their roots right here in Georgia and the civil rights movement of the last century. And we might add, at long last.

If the founding of Georgia began as an effort to create a civic City on a Hill, then the formation of a “new” Cherokee Nation in north Georgia was yet another one, something homegrown but also more than that. The Cherokee Nation won friends and garnered immense national respect, too.

Nevertheless, the Cherokee Nation and the state of Georgia were on a collision course. The American economy was taking off, and in the South, land for growing cotton — land the Cherokee occupied — became ever more valuable. The 1829 discovery of gold in those lands only added fuel to the fire of removal.

Under intense pressure from Georgia and other southern states that wanted Indian lands, Congress reluctantly gave in and passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The new law empowered the president to negotiate with Native American tribes for their relocation in the West.

In a previous column I talked about the founding of Georgia in 1733. A second “civic moment” in our history is equally remarkable, and likewise inadequately acknowledged: the story of the Cherokee of north Georgia.

When the Europeans arrived in the New World they encountered Native American tribal societies, inhabitants of the land for millennia. The nature of the encounters varied, but the overall story is the same: Europeans eventually wrested the lands from those already here.

But what is not much spoken of is what the Cherokee Nation did before they were pushed out. That story begins in the state of Georgia in the 1790s. White settlers migrating west out of the coastal region into the Piedmont bumped up against the Cherokee, not far from present-day Atlanta.

To maintain peace, the Cherokee agreed to successive treaties ceding portions of their land, and eventually found themselves backed into the northwest quadrant of the state.

In their tribal councils, they pondered whether to cede yet more of their lands to the federal government by treaty, in exchange for land beyond the Mississippi River; or perhaps go on the offensive, defending what they already had; or become a “civilized” tribe (adopting Anglo-European ways), which would allow them to continue living on their land.

Around Georgia, a number of mostly crumbling brick cotton mills remain — the remnants of massive buildings that employed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. For the most part mill workers were poor, uneducated, and white. (Few blacks worked in the segregated mills until after World War II.) Mill hands migrated from the countryside’s sharecropping and tenant farming families, as did laborers who struggled to scratch a living from a land that was still trying to recover from a devastating war.

Mill work was rough and not infrequently dangerous. The average day began with the factory morning whistle. Shifts typically ran 10 to 12 hours, and the workweek six days. The high-end hourly rate for men in 1928 was 25 cents, and as low as 10 to 15 cents for women and children.

Old cotton mills can make for beautiful ruins.

Those weather-beaten red-brick buildings with bell towers and rows upon rows of windows have a haunted quality. They stand like long-abandoned monuments, scattered through the countryside and in our towns and cities.

And they give no hint of the deafening roar and lint-clogged air that once spewed from their machines during one of the most culture-changing periods of Georgia history.

Natasha Trethewey’s poems are like anonymous dispatches from a southern past, waiting to be opened by the reader.

They are evocations of another time, another place — stories told hauntingly through the sustained contemplation of a single aged photograph in which bales of cotton and American flags, black children in freshly starched clothes and the image of an American president merge; or a clouded childhood memory of a mother’s bruises hidden by makeup; or the preserved Civil War–era fortress on Ship Island, where the hopes and dreams of the African American native guard — the first black soldiers mustered into the Union Army — swelled for a time and was then forgotten.

Georgia’s history is closely tied to our natural environment, which has been the source of economic opportunity and a destination for leisure activity, a magnet for explorers and tourists, an inspiration for writers and other artists.

Our natural world — Georgia’s wilderness — is of ineffable quality, breathtaking beauty, mysterious beckoning. Our expansive landscape is gifted with a range of natural diversity. The records of Europe’s earliest visitors document their astonishment at the variety of flora and fauna they encountered in this place.

All place has meaning, so long as it can still support memory.

The spot of earth upon which we stand has importance if we can remember what once was there. The stories about the places we occupy give meaning to them and thus to our own lives. Sometimes our sense of place becomes so strong that it establishes sacred space.

For many, Camp Toccoa in north Georgia is sacred ground.

In part one of this story, I talked about the origins of Easy Company — the boys of Currahee — and their training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and their participation in the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944.

By November 1944, the Allied push toward Germany had stalled in the hills and valleys of France and Belgium. German defenses along the Rhine River were seemingly impenetrable. Then, on December 16, at the onset of winter, the enemy launched a massive counteroffensive that caught the Allies by complete surprise.

A German force of seven tank divisions, 250,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and Waffen-SS infantry pushed through the Allied lines in the Ardennes forest of Belgium—the first step in a daring lightning strike to the Meuse River. If successful, it would divide the American and British forces and quite possibly lead to their defeat.