An Online Reference Guide to African American History
Quintard Taylor
Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History
University of Washington, Seattle
An Online Reference Guide to African American History
Quintard Taylor
Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History
University of Washington, Seattle
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First named First Colored Baptist Church and located in Savannah, Georgia, First African Baptist Church traces its roots to December 1777, and is officially designated the oldest African American church in the United States. George Liele, the Church’s founder, continued to evangelize and baptize both the free and enslaved black populations of the Savannah area during the rest of the Revolutionary War period. One of those enslaved people was Andrew Bryan. Lie
Originally named First Colored Baptist Church and located in Savannah, Georgia, First African Baptist Church traces its roots to December 1777 and is officially designated the oldest African American church in the United States. The roots of the black Baptist tradition can be traced to three men: George Leile, David George, and Andrew Bryan. Ordained May 20, 1775, George Leile is recognized as the first ordained black Baptist pastor in Georgia. He converted to Christianity in 1773.
It is believed that the first black Baptist congregation was formed in 1773 in Silver Bluff, South Carolina on the Galphin Plantation, 14 miles northwest of Savannah, Georgia, through the efforts of Rev. Wait Palmer (white founder of the First Baptist Church of Stonington, Connecticut) and George Leile. Galphin allowed his enslaved population to worship under the leadership of his slave, David George, in an empty barn on the plantation. David George was baptized and trained under the tutelage of Leile, who was evangelizing up and down the Savannah River between present-day Augusta and Savannah, Georgia. Under George's leadership, the congregation’s number gradually increased to more than 30. In 1778, when their Patriot master abandoned the plantation under British advance, the whole Silver Bluff group fled to British lines in Savannah.
Black Nationalist, repatriationist and minister, Henry M. Turner was 31 years old at the time of the Emancipation. Turner was born in 1834 in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina to free black parents Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner. The self-taught Turner by the age of fifteen worked as a janitor at a law firm in Abbeville, South Carolina. The firm’s lawyers noted his abilities and helped with his education.
James Nathaniel Brown was born February 17, 1936, in St. Simon Island, Georgia. A talented athlete from an early age, Brown earned 13 letters playing a variety of sports at Manhasset High School in New York.
John T. King was born in Girard (now Phenix City), Alabama in 1846.
Andrew Young came into prominence as a civil rights activist and close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the civil rights movement in the United States. Young worked with various organizations early in the movement but his civil rights work was largely done with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) where he served as an executive director and later executive vice president. Young served on the Board of Directors until 1972.
Benjamin Mays, Christian minister, scholar, advocate for justice, and an educator, was born in Ninety-Six, South Carolina in 1894, the youngest of eight children. His parents, Louvenia Carter and Hezekiah Mays, were tenant farmers and former slaves. Mays attended Virginia Union University before transferring to Bates College in Maine, where he earned a B.A. In 1920, he entered the University of Chicago earning an M.A. (1925) and a Ph.D.
Gloster’s early education began at Brownsville and was continued in Memphis at Howe Institute and Lemoyne College, when his family left Brownsville in 1915 amidst local racial turmoil. Gloster earned an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in 1931 and pursued graduate study at Atlanta University and New York University culminating in the doctorate degree in 1943. He was a founding member of the College Language Association (CLA) in 1937. His long and illustrious career in higher education began at LeMoyne College in Memphis, Tennessee where he taught from 1933 to 1941 and continued at Hampton Institute (1946–1967). In 1967 he began his twenty year tenure as president of Morehouse College. Negro Voices in American Fiction, his pioneering work in black literary criticism, was published in 1948.
John Hope, a native of Augusta, Georgia, began his illustrious career in 1894 as a faculty member at Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee where he taught natural science, Latin and Greek. He also coached the school’s football team. This future President of Morehouse College graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was much loved and respected by his students as evidenced by at least one of them honoring him by nam
The son of former slaves, Roland Hayes, born June 3, 1887 in Curryville, Georgia, became the first African American male to become an internationally acclaimed concert vocalist. As a youth, he sang in his Baptist church and on street corners for tips before attending Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where he performed and toured with the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers, an experience that eventually landed him in Boston. Working odd jobs, by 1915 Hayes had sav
The great-grandson of slaves, Maynard Jackson, Jr. was born in Dallas, Texas. When Maynard was seven years old his father, Maynard Jackson, Sr., a politically active clergyman, moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia, where he assumed pastorship of the Friendship Baptist Church. After graduating from Morehouse College in 1956 with a B.A. degree in political science, he earned a J.D.
Frank Garvin Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia on September 5, 1916. His parents were Wilhelmina and Rufus Yerby. Frank Yerby was the product of an interracial marriage. His father was African American and his mother was of European origin. Yerby grew up in Augusta and attended two local institutions. He graduated from Haines Institute in 1933. Four years later he earned a second degree from Paine College. The following year Yerby entered Fisk University in Nashville where he earned a masters degree. Yerby began studies toward a doctorate in education from the University of Chicago but dropped out before obtaining a degree. 
Henry O. Flipper rose to prominence as the first African American graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1877. Born into slavery to Festus and Isabella Flipper in Thomasville, Georgia, Henry was reared in a family that emphasized excellence, and he and his brothers all became respected members of their communities as a military officer, AME bishop (Joseph), physician (E.H.), college professor (Carl), and farmer (Festus, Jr.). Commissioned a lieutenant in the l0th U.S. Cavalry regiment, Henry Flipper became the highest ranking and most famous of the Buffalo Soldiers (African Americans in all-black units so dubbed by Indians) stationed at Western military installations, Fort Sill, Fort Elliott, Fort Concho, Fort Davis, and Fort Quitman.
Born on the Grest Farm in Liberty County, Georgia, on August 6, 1848, Susie Baker King Taylor was raised as an enslaved person. Her mother was a domestic servant for the Grest family. At the age of 7, Baker and her brother were sent to live with their grandmother in Savannah. Even with the strict laws against formal education of African Americans, they both attended two secret schools taught by black women.
Hosea Hudson was a Communist Party (CP) activist and industrial union organizer in Alabama and Georgia during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. He embodied the CP's turn toward black civil rights in the early 1930s and the attraction many working-class southern blacks felt toward the Party during and, in Hudson's case, well after the Depression decade.
H. Rap Brown succeeded Stokely Carmichael as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party. A leading proponent of Black Power and a polarizing media icon, Brown symbolized both the power and the dangers – for white Americans and for radical activists themselves – of the civil rights movement's new militancy in the late 1960s. 
Bernice Johnson Reagon was born on October 4, 1942 in Albany, Georgia to the Reverend Jessie Johnson and Beatrice Johnson. She began singing at the age of five in her father’s church. Reagon entered Albany State College in Georgia in 1959 as a music major. While at Albany State Johnson initially held the office of secretary for the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth chapter but later left t
Whitney Moore Young, Jr. was born July 31, 1921 in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky on the campus of Lincoln Institute where his father was President. Young received a Bachelor of Science degree from Kentucky State College for Negroes in 1941. 
What started as a $125.00 purchase of a small parcel of land at 15 grew and blossomed over the years into a multi million-dollar company, and with this, Herman Jerome Russell came to epitomize black entrepreneurship by becoming one of the first black millionaires.
Ralph David Abernathy was born on March 11, 1926 in Linden, Alabama. His boyhood was spent on his father’s Alabama farm but he joined the U.S. Army and served in World War II from 1941 to 1945. After his service Abernathy returned to his home state where he attended Alabama State College in Montgomery, Alabama, receiving a degree in Mathematics in 1950.
Eliza Ann Grier was born a slave, but became emancipated and eventually earned her M.D., becoming in 1898 the first African American woman to practice medicine in Georgia. Little is known of Grier’s early life beyond her growing up in Atlanta. In 1883, nearly twenty years after her emancipation, Grier entered Fisk University in Nashville with the goal of becoming a teacher. She earned a degree in education from Fisk eight years later in 1891 because she took everyDorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_132.html
One of the most visible advocates of nonviolence and direct action as methods of social change, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929. As the grandson of the Rev. A.D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church and a founder of Atlanta's NAACP chapter, and the son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who succeeded Williams as Ebenezer's pastor, King's roots were in the African American Baptist church. After attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, King went on to study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and Boston University, where he deepened his understanding of theological scholarship and explored Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent strategy for social change.
King married Coretta Scott in 1953, and the following year he accepted the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology in 1955.
On December 5, 1955, after civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to comply with Montgomery's segregation policy on buses, black residents launched a bus boycott and elected King president of the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. The boycott continued throughout 1956 and King gained national prominence for his role in the campaign. In December 1956 the United States Supreme Court declared Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional and Montgomery buses were desegregated.
After graduation, Barrett, now married, began a career in criminal justice. She worked as a criminal justice planner in East Point, College Park, and Hapeville, Georgia.
Born on December 7, 1948 in Springfield, Massachusetts to well known black nationalist minister Albert Buford Cleage (later Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman) and school teacher Doris Graham Cleage, Pearl Cleage grew up in Detroit and entered Howard University in 1966 to study playwriting. She transferred to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia where she earned a B.A.
William and Ellen Craft were born into slavery. William was born in Macon, Georgia to a master who sold off his family to pay his gambling debts. William’s new owner apprenticed him as a carpenter in order to earn money from his labor. Ellen was born in Clinton, Georgia and was the daughter of an African American slave and her white owner. Ellen had a very
Cynthia Ann McKinney was born on March 17, 1955 in Atlanta, Georgia to parents Billy McKinney, who was a police officer and to a mother, Leola Christion McKinney, who was a nurse.
Best known as an opera singer, Jessye Norman has also lent her rich, dramatic, and powerful voice to recordings and recitals of spirituals and hymns– including a particularly compelling version of “Amazing Grace” and Christmas carols, in addition to recording jazz. She has never limited herself to any one musical genre, and her voice can widely range from contralto to high soprano.
Norman was born on September 15, 1945 in Augusta, Georgia, the child of Silas, an insurance broker, and Janie, a schoolteacher. She began singing in church choirs as a young child, and was taking piano lessons by age eight. Her singing enabled her to attend Howard University on a full scholarship, where she studied with voice teacher Carolyn Grant, and she graduated in 1967. Winning first prize at an international music competition in Germany in 1968 propelled her into international recognition, and by 1972 she had performed her triumphal debut in the title role of Verdi’s Aida at the legendary La Scala opera house in Milan, Italy.
During her lengthy career, Norman has performed throughout the world, including Russia and South America as well as many European countries. She debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1983. Although a Democrat, she accepted the invitation to sing at the inauguration of President Reagan in 1985, singing the folk song “Simple Gifts.” She was chosen to sing at the “Tribute of Light” memorial ceremony in New York City in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Jefferson Franklin Long, a Republican who represented Georgia in the 41st Congress, was the first black member to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives, and was the only black representative from Georgia for just over a century. Long was born a slave in Knoxville, Georgia on March 3, 1836. Little is known of his early years, however by the end of the civil war he had been educated and was working as a tailor in the town of Macon. He was prosperous in business and involved in local politics.
By 1867 he had become active in the Georgia Educational Association and had traveled through the state on behalf of the Republican Party. He also served on the state Republican Central Committee. In 1869 Long chaired a special convention in Macon, Georgia which addressed the problems faced by the freedmen.
In December of 1870 Georgia held elections for two sets of congressional representatives – one for the final session of the 41st Congress (the first two of which Georgia had missed due to delayed readmission to the Union), and one for the 42nd Congress, set to begin in March of 1871. Georgia Republicans nominated Long, an African American, to run for the 41st congress, while Thomas Jefferson Speer, a white American, was chosen to run for the 42nd. Long was elected on January 16th, 1871.
The first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Alice Walker was born the eighth child of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Walker became the valedictorian of her segregated high school class, despite an accident at age eight that impaired the vision in her left eye. Before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College, where she received a B.A.
Henry “Hank” Johnson Jr. represents Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. The district includes DeKalb County, where Johnson has lived and worked for the past several decades, as well as parts of Gwinnett and Rockdale Counties.
David Scott represents Georgia’s 13th district in the U.S. House of Representatives. The 13th district includes portions of Cobb, Clayton, Douglas, Fulton, Henry, and DeKalb counties. 
Lucy Craft Laney, educator, school founder, and civil rights activist, was born in Georgia on April 13, 1854 in Macon, Georgia to free parents Louisa and David Laney. David Laney, a Presbyterian minister and skilled carpenter, had purchased his freedom approximately twenty years before Lucy Laney’s birth. He purchased Louisa’s freedom shortly after they were married.
Veteran auto racer Bill Lester was born February 6, 1961, in Washington, D.C. Lester earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and worked at Hewlett-Packard for a year before becoming a race car driver. 
Bishop, a Democrat, represents the 2nd District of Georgia. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and is also a part of the Blue Dog Democrats, a group of moderate to conservative Democrats in Congress whose goal is to move the Democratic Party further to the right. Since 2003 he has served on the House Committee on Appropriations, sitting on the Subcommittee for Defense, the Subcommittee on Military Construction / Veterans Affairs and the Subcommittee on Agriculture.
Augustus Granville Dill, sociologist, business manager, musician, and colleague of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, is best known for his work overseeing the publication of Du Bois’s journal, The Crisis, between 1913 and 1928. He also helped publish The Brownies’ Book, a pioneering magazine for black children published from 1920 to 1921. In many ways, A.G. Dill represented the possibilities but also the difficulties of the college-educated “talented tenth” generation that Du Bois lauded as civil rights pioneers in his seminal Souls of Black Folk (1903). 
Henry Hugh Proctor was an author, lecturer and a clergyman of the Congregational Church. Proctor was born on December 8, 1868 near Fayetteville, Tennessee to former slave parents Richard and Hannah (Murray) Proctor. Proctor attended local schools but was only able to take classes for three months out of the year, as he had to help his parents on their farm for the remaining months.
Benjamin Griffith Brawley was a college professor, author and the first dean of Morehouse College. Born in 1882 in Columbia, South Carolina to a middle class family, Brawley was the second son of Edward McKnight Brawley and Margaret Dickerson Brawley. His father was a clergyman and taught at Benedict College.
Jesse Max Barber, journalist, dentist, and civil rights leader, was born on July 5, 1878 in Blackstock, South Carolina to former slave parents. As a young man he worked as a barber while completing the teacher’s training course at Benedict College, Columbia, S.C. His literary career began in 1903 while attending Virginia Union University in Richmond. While there, he became student editor of the University Journal and was president of the Literary Society. 
Vincent G. Harding, civil rights leader, teacher, scholar, engaged citizen, and seeker is especially noted for his close association with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his decades of social justice work. Harding was born on July 25, 1931 in Harlem. His mother Mabel Harding was one of the most influential people in his life.
History of American Negro; History of Coweta County, Georgia; Bill Banks, “Sharing Untold Stories,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution (February 1, 2001); Karen Jordan, “From a Dream to a Legacy,” The Tennessean (November 16, 2003); Karen Jordan, “Meharry Legacy Continues,” Interpreter Magazine (February-March 2004); W. Winston Skinner, “Descendant Plans Book about Pioneer Local Black Doctor,” Newnan Times-Herald (July 10, 2006); www.karenjordanwrites.com.
Horace King, born a slave on September 8, 1807 in Chesterfield District, South Carolina, was a successful bridge architect and builder in West Georgia, Northern Alabama and northeast Georgia in the period between the 1830s and 1870s. King worked for his master, John Godwin who owned a successful construction business. Although King was a slave, Godwin treated him as a valued employee and eventually gave him considerable influence over hi
John S. Lupold, John S., and Thomas L. French Jr. Bridging Deep South
Rivers: The Life and Legend of Horace King (Athens: The University of
Georgia Press, 2004); John N. Ingham and Lynne B. Feldman, African
American Business Leaders (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1993); Thomas L. French and Edward L. French, "Horace King, Bridge
Builder," Alabama Heritage 11 (Winter 1989): 34-47.
Otis Redding was one of the great American soul singers, who, although only enjoying a short career due to his early death in a plane crash at the age of 26, has been described as the embodiment of soul and one of the most important cultural icons of the civil rights movement.
Otis Ray Redding, Jr., son of sharecropper Otis Redding, Sr., and Fannie Mae Redding, was born on September 9, 1941, the fourth child of six, near Dawson, Georgia. The next year the family moved to Macon, Georgia. From an early age Otis’s passion lay in music, drawing inspiration from fellow Macon entertainer Little Richard Penniman. By the time he was ten Redding was singing with a choir at Vineville Baptist Church and playing drums in a gospel group. At age eleven Redding participated in a local talent show, eventually winning 15 monthly contests in a row.
In 1958 at the age of 17 Redding started his professional singing career. He briefly toured with the “Pat Tea Cake” band before forming his own band, “The Pinetoppers” in 1959, with well known Macon guitarist Johnny Jenkins. The Pinetoppers performed Elvis Presley songs and country music songs in the Macon area. They also toured on the “Chitlin’ circuit,” a network of black nightclubs throughout the Southeast and the white frat house circuit across the Deep South.
In September 1959, at the age of 18, Redding met Zelma Attwood, a Macon waitress. The couple married in August, 1961 and had three children, Dexter, Karla, and Otis III.
Scott Freeman, Otis!: The Otis Redding Story (New York: St. Martin's
Griffin Press, 2001); Rhino Records, Los Angeles, Otis!: the definitive
Otis Redding [sound recording], (1993).
Harry Herbert Pace was the founder of the first black record company, Pace Phonograph Corporation which sold recordings under the Black Swan Records label. He was born on January 6, 1884 in Covington, Georgia the son of Charles Pace and Nancy Ferris Pace. His father, a blacksmith by trade, died while Harry was still an infant leaving him to be raised by his mother. Pace graduated from elementary school when he was twelve and finished at Atlanta University seven years later as valedictorian. W.E.B. Du Bois was one of his instructors. After graduation he worked in a printing company. He also worked for banking and insurance companies first in Atlanta and later in Memphis.
In 1912, after moving to Memphis, Pace met W.C. Handy. The two men became friends, writing songs together. During this period Pace met and later married Ethlynde Bibb. Pace and Handy formed the Pace and Handy Music Company together and work with composers such as William Grant Sill and Fletcher Henderson. Pace moved to New York to manage the sheet music business but later decided to form a record company.
Pace Phonograph Corporation Inc. was founded in March, 1921 with $30,000 in borrowed capital. The label Black Swan Records was named after Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield a famous 19th Century entertainer known as the “Black Swan” for her singing.
Jitu K. Weusi, The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records, http://www.redhotjazz.com/blackswan.html; Joan Potter, African American Firsts, (New York, NY: Kensington Publishing Group, 2002).
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, born in Atlanta, Georgia on April 25, 1942, was a civil rights leader. Robinson, the second oldest of seven children born to Alice and John T. Smith, was raised in Atlanta’s black middleclass neighborhood of Summerhill. She graduated from Price High School in 1958 and earned a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Spelman College in 1965. Robinson’s exposure to racial discrimination in her city, the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins in February 1960, all influenced her to become involved in the civil rights movement.
In April 1960, Robinson attended a mass meeting for college students at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. At this meeting and under the guidance of South Christian Leadership Conference representative, Ella Baker, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded. Robinson was designated a SNCC field representative and assisted in organizing chapters in Charleston, South Carolina, Nashville Tennessee, and Macomb, Mississippi.
Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998). Bettye Collier Thomas, and V.P. Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Howard Zinn, SNCC, the New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, DC: Open Hand Publishing, 1985).
Vernon Eulion Jordan, civil rights leader, lawyer, and presidential advisor, was born in Atlanta, Georgia on August 15, 1935. Growing up in the segregated American South, Jordan attended David T. Howard High School, where he graduated with honors in 1953.
Vernon E. Jordan, Vernon Can Read: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); NAACP, NAACP Administration 1956-65. General office file. Register and Vote –Taconic Foundation Voter Education Project, 1961-1964 (Bethesda: University Publications of America, 1995); Pat Rediger, Great African Americans in Civil Rights (New York: Crabtree Publication, Co., 1996); http://www.akingump.com/vjordan/.
Jesse B. Blayton, Sr., was a pioneer African American radio station entrepreneur. Blayton founded WERD-AM in Atlanta, Georgia on October 3, 1949 making him the first African American to own and operate a radio station in the United States.
Jesse Blayton was born in Fallis, Oklahoma, on December 6, 1879. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1922 and then moved to Atlanta, Georgia to establish a private practice as an accountant. Blayton passed the Georgia accounting examination in 1928, becoming the state's first black Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and only the fourth African American nationwide to hold the certification.
Blayton also taught accounting at Atlanta University where he encouraged younger blacks to enter the profession. He had little success. Blayton later recalled that much of his recruiting difficulty came from the students' knowledge that no white-owned accounting firms would hire them and his, the only black-owned firm in the South, was small and had few openings. A decade after Blayton became a CPA there were still only seven other blacks in the U.S. who had achieved that status.
William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1999); Theresa A. Hammond, A White-Collar
Profession: African American Public Accountants since 1921 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); "WERD" in the New
Georgia Encyclopedia (online), http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org.
Charles Sherrod was a key civil rights leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) whose leadership led to the Albany Movement in southwest Georgia. Born in extreme poverty to his fourteen-year old mother in 1937 in St. Petersburg, Virginia, he worked to help support six younger children. Sherrod worked his way through Virginia Union College, receiving a B.A. in 1958 and a Bachelors of Divinity in 1961. He joined SNCC in 1960, participating in the organization's first demonstrations and voter registration drives.
In October 1961, Sherrod became the first field secretary and SNCC director of southwest Georgia. He and Cordell Reagon opened an SNCC office near the all-black Albany State College. On November 1, they launched a student sit-in at the bus terminal station to test the recently enacted law desegregating bus and train terminals. When local law enforcement officials blocked the demonstrators, the single protest became the two-year Albany campaign. It eventually led to multiple protests by thousands of students as well as the involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King, a public plea from President John F. Kennedy to city officials, and resolution of the issue by local black leaders to resolve the issue. Ultimately the civil rights activists organized by Charles Sherrod would prevail.
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the
1960s (New York: Harvard UP, 1981); Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African
American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999);
http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/witnesses/charles_sherrod.html
Alice Coachman became the first African American women from any country to win an Olympic Gold Medal when she competed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Born November 9, 1923, in Albany, Georgia, to Evelyn and Fred Coachman, Alice was the fifth of ten children. As an athletic child of the Jim Crow South, who was denied access to regular training facilities, Coachman trained by running on dirt roads and creating her own hurdles to practice jumping.
Even though Alice Coachman parents did not support her interest in athletics, she was encouraged by Cora Bailey, her fifth grade teacher at Monroe Street Elementary School, and her aunt, Carrie Spry, to develop her talents. After demonstrating her skills on the track at Madison High School, Tuskegee Institute offered sixteen-year-old Coachman a scholarship to attend its high school program. She competed on and against all-black teams throughout the segregated South.
In 1943, Coachman entered the Tuskegee Institute college division to study dressmaking. She played on the basketball team and ran track-and-field, where she won four national championships for events in sprinting and high jumping. Coachman completed a degree in dressmaking in 1946. In 1947, Coachman enrolled in Albany State College (now University) to continue her education. Coachman completed a B.S. degree in Home Economics with a minor in science at Albany State College in 1949 and became teacher and track-and-field instructor.
http://www.alicecoachman.com; Jennifer H. Landsbury, “Alice Coachman:
Quiet Champion of the 1940s,” Chap. in Out of the Shadows: A
Biographical History of African American Athletes (Fayetteville, The
University of Arkansas Press, 2006).
The Atlanta Negro Voters League (ANVL) was a political organization which focused on mobilizing the strength of black voters in Georgia's capital city from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. After a 1946 court ruling ordered the end of Georgia’s all white primaries, the percentage of registered black voters across the state surged to 25% by 1949. ANVL was founded July 7, 1949 in the Butler Street YMCA to take advantage of this growing electorate.
Officially ANVL was nonpartisan organization. This ensured that black Republicans and black Democrats would work together to encourage the ongoing growth of the African American electorate. Both groups pledged to work with white moderates to keep white racists from gaining office in Atlanta.
The first two co–chairs of ANVL were leader of the Fulton County Republican Club, John Wesley Dobbs, and president of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and leader of the Fulton County Citizens Democratic Club, A.T. Walden. ANVL was structured around various committees that took on various political tasks throughout the city. The registration committee was the most important of the organization since it helped Atlanta’s black residents to register to vote and thus increased the organization's political influence.
Nina Mjagkij, Organizing Black America (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2001); "The Atlanta Negro Voters League," New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-873.
The National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated (NBCUSA) is made up of approximately 7.5 million African American Baptists, making it the largest African-American organization in the country. It was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 1895 when the leaders of the American National Baptist Convention, the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention and the National Baptist Educational Convention joined to form the National Baptist Convention (NBC).
The NBC was rooted in the Consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention (CABMC), which was formed in the 1860s and provided a platform for black Baptists at that time. The CABMC’s survival was contingent on the support of northern white Baptists and lost its funding after Reconstruction. In 1890, the call for a national black Baptist organization was renewed when a controversy arose in the religious publishing world. The Baptist Teacher, published by the white-run American Baptist Publication Society, asked three black Baptist authors to write for the publication. The white Southern Baptist Convention complained and the editors rescinded the offer. Black Baptists were offended and angered. The National Baptist Convention was formed in 1895 in order to unite black Baptists and consolidate their influence. Elias Camp Morris was elected the first president and served until his death in 1921.
Nina Mjagkij, Organizing Black America (New York, NY: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 2001); Nina Mjagkij, Portraits of African American
Life Since 1865 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2003);
http://www.nationalbaptist.com.
Richard Wayne Penniman, also known as Little Richard, is considered one of the most influential artists in the early years of rock and roll. This singer, songwriter, and pianist was born in 1932 in Macon, Georgia, the son of Charles "Bud" Penniman and Leva Mae Stewart Penniman. His music interests began when he worked at the Macon City Auditorium where he saw acts like Cab Calloway. While working there he was asked to sing a duet with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a well-known gospel singer, during one of her performances. He agreed and proved very popular with the audience. Soon after the duet he joined Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show and played the piano as an accompaniment. He found a band when the singer I.A. Harris quit and the members asked Penniman to replace him. He continued the tour with them and was dubbed the title "Little Richard." In 1951, nineteen year old Little Richard Penniman signed with RCA Records and recorded his first single, “Every Hour.”
After witnessing poverty and discrimination in Depression-era Georgia, Louis Wade Sullivan committed his career to education and public service, rising to become Secretary of Health and Human Services under President George H.W. Bush. He also was the founder and long-time president of Morehouse College School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.
Louis Wade Sullivan was born in Atlanta in 1933, but when his family moved to a small Georgia farming community that did not offer educational opportunities for African Americans, he was sent to live with relatives in Savannah where he could attend school. After graduating at the top of his high school class, he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, earning a B.S. in the premedical program in 1954. He then received a scholarship to Boston University School of Medicine, where he was the only African American in his class. He graduated third in his class, earning an M.D. (cum laude) in 1958. During his internship and residency at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Sullivan conducted research into the correlation between blood and diseases. He made several discoveries concerning alcohol and blood health, and subsequently conducted further medical research at Harvard Medical School and a number of other institutions during the following decades. In 1976, he helped found the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools to promote a national minority health agenda.
Hoyt W. Fuller, editor and writer, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923. After an illness caused his mother, Lillie Beatrice Ellafair Thomas, to become an invalid and after the death of his father, Thomas Fuller, in 1927, Fuller went to live with his aunt in Detroit, Michigan. As a child, Fuller often returned to Atlanta to visit his grandmother, who encouraged him to explore black culture.
Denise Majette, former member of Congress, attorney, judge, and politician, was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 18, 1955 to Voyd Lee and Olivia (Foster) Majette. In 1976, Majette graduated from Yale University. She earned her law degree from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina in 1979.
After graduating, Majette joined the Legal Aid Society in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. During this period, she also served on faculty at the Wake Forest Law School. Majette relocated to Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1983. During the early1980s, she held positions as a clerk and an assistant to judges. From 1989 to 1992, Majette returned to private practice as a partner in the Atlanta law firm of Jenkins, Nelson, and Welch. During this period, she also served on the boards of various community organizations. In 1992, she was named an administrative law judge at the Georgia state board of workers' compensation. The following year, Georgia Governor Zell Miller appointed her judge of the State Court of DeKalb County. Majette held the judgeship for nine years.
Shirley Clarke Franklin became Atlanta, Georgia’s first African American female mayor in 2001, as well as the first woman to be a mayor of a major southern city. Clarke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 10, 1945 to parents Eugene Haywood Clarke and Ruth Lyons Clarke. She attended public schools in Philadelphia. In 1963 at the age of 18, Clarke participated in the March on Washington where she saw and was inspired by Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. 
Harkness Hall, Clark Atlanta University
Established in 1881 and chartered by the State of Georgia in 1885, Morris Brown College is a private, liberal arts college located in Atlanta, Georgia. The school opened its doors on October 15, 1885 with 107 students and 9 teachers. Morris Brown College was founded by members of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and is named in honor of Rev. Morris Brown of Charleston, South Carolina, the second Bishop of the AME Church. 
