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Historic Georgia landscapes in bloom

by Jamil Zainaldin

This week guest columnist GLENN T. ESKEW, a Georgia State University professor, explores historic landscapes.

For the second time, the inclement weather had passed north of Atlanta, and I found myself heading south to attend yet another history conference. The academic year was in full swing, and scholars like the winter months for symposia. Rather than take the interstate, I prefer riding back roads and drove down Georgia Highway 15 through the old Cotton Belt.

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It’s time for music in Georgia

by Jamil Zainaldin

This week, guest columnist STANLEY ROMANSTEIN of Georgia State University makes a case for supporting the music industry in Georgia.

How do we create and promote a viable, growing, sustainable music industry in our state? Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller first put that question to the Georgia General Assembly in 1978 by naming both a Senate Music Recording Industry Study Committee and a Music Recording Industry Advisory Committee.

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Celebrating southern songwriter Johnny Mercer

by Jamil Zainaldin

This week guest columnist GLENN T. ESKEW, discusses Johnny Mercer’s connection to the Great American Songbook and Georgia State University.

On Friday, February 26 at 8 p.m. Georgia State University will hold its biannual Mercer Celebration at the Rialto Center for the Arts with a performance by trumpeter Joe Gransden joined by vocalist Kathleen Bertrand and the Georgia State University Big Band. With this concert, Georgia State University celebrates native son Johnny Mercer, as well as its own good fortune in housing Mercer’s memorabilia, donated to the university by his widow, Ginger, in June 1981.

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Helen Matthews Lewis, mountain saint

by Jamil Zainaldin

Recently, Atlanta actor Brenda Bynum introduced me to Helen Matthews Lewis through a brilliant one-person play. The locale was the Craddock Center of Cherry Log, Georgia, an educational and cultural venue for children, families, and communities in southern Appalachia. Helen Lewis is a native Georgian and professional sociologist who helped found the discipline of Appalachian Studies, an academic movement that combines scholarship, teaching, and community engagement in the South’s mountain region.

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Eugene Bullard: boxer, soldier, fighter pilot, spy, and elevator operator

by Jamil Zainaldin

This week guest columnist CHRIS DOBBS, editorial assistant for the New Georgia Encyclopedia, shares the story of Eugene Bullard, son of a former slave, and the first black fighter pilot.

Eugene Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895. As an expatriate in France, he became a boxer, soldier, fighter pilot, business owner, and spy. During his final years, in the United States, he was an elevator operator. Bullard’s story is particularly engaging. He was obviously a tight spring of potential as a boy, and it’s fascinating to see how high he flew as soon as the environment around him allowed it. The difference between his life in the United States and his life in Europe lends his life its striking cinematic scale.

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Why history matters

by Jamil Zainaldin

This week guest columnist PEARL MCHANEY, a Georgia State University professor, discusses how voices from our past speak to our present.

With inflammatory rhetoric about citizenship, the value of lives black, brown, and white, and the memorialization/revision of history, I feel that hearing the carefully written words of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Ernest Gaines will help to ground us in our shared past and give us opportunity to engage in reasoned discourse.

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