Born in Georgia just a few years after emancipation, Mary Jackson McCrorey was a committed educator and activist for Black Americans in the South. This portrait accompanies her biographical entry in the North Carolina edition of History of the American Negro (1921).
From the New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division.
Mary Jackson McCrorey was part of an extensive network of educators and activists. The Southeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, which was founded by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune in 1920, boasted an impressive list of members, some of whom are seen here.
In the front row, from left to right: Margaret Murray Washington (Mrs. Booker T. Washington), Mary McLeod Bethune, Lucy Craft Laney, and Mary Jackson McCrorey. The back row, from left to right: Janie Porter Barrett, M.L. Crosthwaite, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Lugenia Burns Hope. The photo’s seal is from Poole Studio in Atlanta.
Courtesy of the Bethune-Cookman University Archives, Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, FL., Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation Collection.
Attorney and academic leader Philip Weltner, born July 18, 1887, worked for nearly nine decades enacting social, judicial, and educational change in Georgia.
Courtesy of Philip Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University.
Philip Weltner held several academic leadership positions, including chancellor of the University System of Georgia and president of Oglethorpe University.
Courtesy of Philip Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University.
Sally Cobb Hull, born in Athens in 1887, married Philip Weltner in 1913. After Weltner retired from his position as president of Oglethorpe University, the couple moved to a plot of land behind the Brookhaven campus, gifted by the University's Board of Trustees.
Image from A.L. Hull
As president of Oglethorpe University from 1944-53, Philip Weltner revamped the core curriculum program and saved the university from near financial ruin. The Philip Weltner Library at Lowry Hall, shown here, is named in his honor.
Image from Jack Kennard
Educator and suffragist Adella Hunt Logan received an honorary master's degree from Atlanta University in 1901. The degree was "honorary" because the school was not yet accredited to grant graduate degrees.
From Adele Logan Alexander's personal collection
Adella Hunt Logan is pictured in her wedding dress in Atlanta. She married Tuskegee Institute treasurer Warren Logan in 1888.
From Wikimedia
After accepting a teaching position at the Tuskegee Institute in 1883, Adella Hunt Logan forged enduring relationships with fellow educators and civil rights leaders. Among her new acquaintances was NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom she shared a lifelong correspondence.
Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington and school treasurer Warren Logan are featured in the Lincoln Jubilee Album, shortly after Washington's death in 1915.
Image from Wikimedia, Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection.
Helen Lewis, activist and scholar, was a founder of the Appalachian Studies discipline. After moving to Wise, Virginia, in the heart of coal country, in 1955, she came to despise the human and environmental devastation caused by the coal and chemical industry.
Courtesy of Appalachian State University, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection.
Living Social Justice in Appalachia was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2012. Compiled by longtime colleagues Judith Jennings and Patricia Beaver, it contains biographical essays, oral histories, and interviews with Helen Lewis.
Annie L. McPheeters, pictured circa 1940, was appointed assistant librarian at the Auburn Branch of the Carnegie Library of Atlanta in 1934. McPheeters was responsible for developing the library's core Negro History Collection, housed today at the Auburn Avenue Research Library.
Courtesy of Archives Division, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System. Photograph by Lane Brothers
Annie L. Watters (McPheeters), pictured in 1934, stands beside the booktruck that she used as a librarian in Greenville, South Carolina. That same year she arrived at the Auburn Branch of the Atlanta Public Library, where she became one of the city's first African American professional librarians.
Courtesy of Archives Division, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System
Annie L. Watters (McPheeters) stands outside the Auburn Branch of the Atlanta Public Library, circa 1938. McPheeters worked at the Auburn Branch from 1934 until 1949, during which time she launched and expanded the Negro History Collection, housed today at the Auburn Avenue Research Library.
Courtesy of Archives Division, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System
Atlanta librarian Annie L. McPheeters (center), pictured circa 1955, participates in a Friends of the Library Broadcast on WERD radio. With her are Ernestine Brazeal (left), president of Friends of the Library, and Vivian Beavers, member of Friends of the Library.
Courtesy of Archives Division, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System
Journalist Lucian Lamar Knight worked as a literary editor for the Atlanta Constitution and as an associate editor for the Atlanta Georgian before becoming the founder and first director of the Georgia Department of Archives and History (later Georgia Archives).
Courtesy of Georgia Archives,
Ad Hoc Collection, #
ah00134.
Horace Mann Bond, a historian and the father of Georgia politician Julian Bond, served as the president of Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School (later Fort Valley State University) from 1939 to 1945. During that time, he doubled the school's income and oversaw its transition to a four-year college.
Marie Woolfolk Taylor, a native of Atlanta, was one of the cofounders of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the first Greek-letter organization in the nation to be established by Black college women. The sorority began in 1908 at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and as of 2006 comprises more than 170,000 members.
From Footprints in the Sands of Time, by M. H. Parker
The Athens Garden Club installed a marker at the grave site of Malthus Ward, the first professor of natural history at the University of Georgia, in 1987. After leaving the university in 1842, Ward opened a commercial garden in Athens and founded the Horticultural Society of Georgia.
Photograph by LeAnna Biles Schooley
Trees planted by natural historian Malthus Ward during the 1830s still stand outside his former home on Dearing Street in Athens. During his tenure as a professor at the University of Georgia, Ward maintained a botanical garden on the property.
Photograph by LeAnna Biles Schooley
Wessie Connell works in her office at the Roddenbery Memorial Library in Cairo, circa 1970. Connell founded the first public library in Cairo in 1939 and is credited with developing such outreach activities as children's story time and book mobiles.
Courtesy of Roddenbery Memorial Library
Benjamin Mays was the president of Morehouse college from 1940 until his retirement in 1967.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College from 1940 until 1967, attends a birthday party in his honor on August 11, 1973.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
Benjamin Mays speaks with Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Among his many accomplishments at the University of Georgia, Steadman Sanford founded the journalism school and established a modern football stadium for the UGA Bulldogs.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Steadman Vincent Sanford Papers.
Martha Berry, the daughter of a wealthy Floyd County planter, founded several "Berry Schools" that were established to provide poor children in the north Georgia mountains with the opportunity to earn an education. In 1902 she founded in Rome the school that would become Berry College
Courtesy of Berry College Archives
As a result of her work of forty years with education and Berry College, Martha Berry is among Georgia's most prominent women of the first half of the twentieth century.
From The World's Work, 1907
Martha Berry was awarded the Roosevelt Medal in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge.
Courtesy of Berry College Archives
Martha Berry's school programs emphasized the regenerative power of work. Diligent labor, she believed, would promote character in her students by encouraging responsibility and a sense of self-worth.
Clarence Birdseye (left), founder of Birdseye Frozen Foods, tastes products developed through the research efforts of Dr. Jasper Guy Woodroof (right) in 1940.
Courtesy of Lawrence Akers
Jasper Guy Woodroof, a pioneer in food science and technology and often called the "father of food science," made outstanding scientific and technical contributions to the food industry over the course of his professional career.
Courtesy of Lawrence Akers
Thornwell Jacobs became the president of Oglethorpe University in 1915. Jacobs is depicted in academic regalia in a painting by the portraitist Charles Naegle.
Courtesy of Oglethorpe University Archives
In 1933 Thornwell Jacobs launched his "University of the Air," a pioneer effort at distance learning that broadcast college credit courses over radio station WJTL.
Courtesy of Oglethorpe University Archives
David C. Barrow Jr. served as chancellor of the University of Georgia from 1906 to 1925, a position roughly analogous to the modern presidency of that institution. Barrow led the university through a period of great growth.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
Students at the University of Georgia nicknamed David C. Barrow Jr. "Uncle Dave" and thought of him as benevolent, wise, caring, and able to enforce rules with the proper mixture of justice and concern.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
David C. Barrow Jr.'s name survives in Barrow County, in an Athens elementary school and an Athens street, and at the University of Georgia in Barrow Hall and the David C. Barrow Chair of Mathematics. Barrow died in 1929.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
David C. Barrow Jr. used his political skills in dealing with the usual problems of administering a university, such as the place of intercollegiate athletics and the role of powerful deans with statewide constituencies (especially the College of Agriculture). Barrow often had to lobby the legislature for funds.
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Georgia Photo File.
John and Lugenia Burns Hope, pictured with their sons, John and Edward, were leaders in Atlanta's Black community during the early 1900s. John Hope served as president of both Morehouse College and Atlanta University, and Lugenia Burns Hope founded Atlanta's Neighborhood Union.
John Hope, the first Black president of both Morehouse College and Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University), was an important African American educator and race leader of the early twentieth century.
Image from The Crisis, Vol 8, No 1, May 1914
Lucy Craft Laney’s portrait, pictured, was the first portrait of an African American woman to be displayed in the Georgia state capitol. It was selected by Governor Jimmy Carter in 1974. Laney was also inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement in 1992.
Courtesy of Georgia Capitol Museum, University of Georgia Libraries, Capitol Art Collection (Capitol Museum Collection), # 1992.23.0050.
Photographs taken at the Haines Institute, such as this one of a sewing class, were among those displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition as part of the Exhibit of American Negroes, which aimed to document the lives of Black Americans at the turn of the century. W.E.B. Du Bois and his colleagues compiled over 500 images for the exhibit.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, #LC-USZ62-132448.
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