New park helps small city’s residents discover “greene” space and forgotten son of the New South
[vc_row][vc_column][mk_fancy_title font_family=”none” el_class=”blog-titles”]New park helps small city’s residents discover “greene” space and forgotten son of the New South[/mk_fancy_title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Brian BrodrickThe name—Atticus Greene Haygood—conjures images of To Kill a Mockingbird and old Georgia, which are both appropriate. If it were not for the New Georgia Encyclopedia, preservation of his family home by two Georgia artists, and careful stewardship by Emory University, the details of this remarkable Georgian’s life could have been lost. (more…)
READ MOREBehind the scenes at the Governor’s Mansion, the “people’s house”
[vc_row][vc_column][mk_fancy_title font_family=”none” el_class=”blog-titles”]Behind the scenes at the Governor’s Mansion, the “people’s house”[/mk_fancy_title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Jennifer Dickey and Catherine LewisAs he was leaving an event at the Governor’s Mansion in Ansley Park in 1963, C&S Bank president Mills Lane was nearly struck on the head by a stone that broke loose from the porch. Lane had long been an advocate for a new Governor’s Mansion to replace the house in Ansley Park that had served as home for Georgia’s governors since 1924; the close call with the falling stone was, for him, the last straw. (more…)
READ MORETeaching a new generation a lesson in resilience
[vc_row][vc_column][mk_fancy_title font_family=”none” el_class=”blog-titles”]Teaching a new generation a lesson in resilience[/mk_fancy_title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Georgia Humanities StaffThe old one-room schoolhouse in Cave Spring, Georgia, had nearly surrendered to kudzu, its floor and roof sagging and caving. But when Joyce Perdue-Smith, the daughter of one of the school’s former principals, learned that the Fairview Elementary School was still there, she said, “There is no way we are going to let that go.”
Fairview, built in 1924, is believed to have been a “Rosenwald school” for African American students, one of nearly 5,000 schools built between 1912 and 1932 in rural areas of 15 southern states. Their mission: to bridge the stark disparity of educational opportunity that existed between black and white communities of the time.
The schools were the product of an unlikely alliance between black author, educator, and orator Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, Jewish philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. While Washington conceived the idea, Rosenwald supplied the seed money—to be matched by the community.
Although most of these schools were largely forgotten in the decades after school desegregation, one dedicated group, led by Perdue-Smith, is doing its best—with the help of a Georgia Humanities grant—to ensure, in Perdue-Smith’s words, “that the Fairview school lives on to educate, inform, and remind visitors of a unique and challenging educational period for African Americans.”
Perdue-Smith, who teaches accounting at Shorter College, established and is the executive director of the Fairview/E. S. Brown Heritage Corporation. In this position, she has extensively recruited more than 200 school alumni to help support the creation of several exhibitions, as well as the eventual preservation and renovation of the school. (She also happens to be a 2015 recipient of the Governor’s Award for the Arts & Humanities.)
According to alumni, while Fairview certainly provided “the 3 R’s,” the lasting education was the life-affirming, character-building skills of having pride, respect, and determination to move beyond poverty and limited opportunity. Their daily mantra was “Good, better, best, I will not let it rest, until my good is better, and my better is best.”
Fairview alumnus Ted Barnet fondly remembered his teachers, who “taught us to keep our head up and our mind focused, to do our best, and to appreciate things even though life was hard.”
A Georgia Humanities grant, which supplemented other funds donated by the community, helped create a permanent exhibition at the Cave Spring History Museum, as well as a portable, museum-quality exhibition that has toured the area.
The permanent exhibition features a recreated typical classroom, complete with both teacher and student desks, textbooks, and sample classroom assignments. Both exhibitions were designed by alumni, with many original items donated by former teachers and students. Visitors unfamiliar with the history of segregated education had the period brought to life before their eyes.
The exhibition also featured a replica of a schoolbus, made of a truck plus bus parts, and crafted by a student’s father at the time. Perdue-Smith said, “It’s a great example of how the community pulled together in the name of educating their children.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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Georgia’s rural churches
[vc_row][vc_column][mk_fancy_title font_family=”none” el_class=”blog-titles”]Georgia’s rural churches[/mk_fancy_title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Jamil ZainaldinPassing through rural towns and countryside, drivers come across unmistakable beacons of another time. They represent glad tidings, plain beauty, and sacred space. They are the ground of memory, where words once uttered inside their walls hang like invisible curtains. They are spiritual mountains, despite their modest presentation—aging, mostly one-room structures graced by the simple lines of clapboard siding, shingles, pitched tin roofs, colored glass, and modest bell towers. The eye naturally comes to rest on the steps leading to a front-door entry, like a standing invitation.
I am speaking of Georgia’s rural churches. They are the living landmarks of Georgia’s pioneers, signposts of a westward movement that blazed farther and farther into lands once occupied by the Cherokee and Creek nations. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Quakers, Catholics, Lutherans, and others arrived in Georgia fleeing persecution or poverty, bringing with them a worldview that placed God at the center. While their theology did not reveal in practice an equal inclusivity of all people (especially Indians and African Americans), most nineteenth-century Georgians believed that God was a living presence, a guiding force.
Churches served practical purposes, too: rural life could be transient, dangerously unpredictable, hard, and lonely. Beyond the courthouse and jail, the hand of government was light, if felt at all. Here, the whitewashed church stood as a visible reminder of a higher moral life. It was in such churches that neighbors learned to lean on one another, the place where baptisms and funerals occurred. It was the welcoming door for new arrivals, of all ages. The church marked the seasons of planting and harvesting, as well as the cycles of life and death (and the possibilities of rebirth). They became shelters from all manner of storms. With the passage of time, and the advancement of democracy, the purpose of these churches—to elevate the human spirit—also fed noble impulses for improvements in education and civil rights. Indeed, these churches often doubled as a community’s school and meeting house.
Of extraordinary and special note is the praise house, where slaves might gather on a Sunday to worship. According to New Georgia Encyclopedia contributor Art Rosenbaum, such services often included the ring shout, in which rhythmic hand clapping and counterclockwise dancing were performed to spirituals. For its practitioners, the shout affirmed oneness with the Spirit and ancestors as well as community cohesiveness. Today, the ring-shout tradition is being preserved by the McIntosh County Shouters, tradition-bearers of Gullah-Geechee heritage.
After their emancipation, Georgia’s freedmen founded and nurtured rural churches that functioned precisely as did their antebellum precursors. Added to the challenges of life for these newly freed people was the very real struggle for survival in a hard and hostile world.
What will become of Georgia’s historic rural churches? While some remain in use, many of these structures, if they still stand, are exposed to the elements of weather and neglect, orphans of bygone communities. To me, the country church is like a sentinel, a symbol of community faith expressed in fellowship, friendship, and the sharing of burdens. It was where country folk learned news of their neighbors and, such as could be imagined at the time, of the world.
On your next car trip, explore an alternate route to your destination. Traffic is light on Georgia’s back roads, where the countryside can span the horizon. Dotted here and there are historic towns with their courthouses, main squares, freight depots (probably restored) and impressive, solid churches of brick, stone and stained glass. A few miles or more beyond the town, keep an eye out for country churches. On a Sunday, you may even spot worshipers, their pickups and cars announcing their presence. But more often the country church stands starkly vacant, hauntingly so with its gravestones set against backdrops of sky, field, and forest. Who owns this property? Is it used at all? Is there anybody caring for this place?
In a sense, country churches are not gone. It is we who are gone, as Sonny Seals knows only too well. While researching an abandoned historic church in Powelton, in Hancock County, he accidentally (and completely unexpectedly) happened upon a Confederate gravestone that, to his amazement, bore his great-grandfather’s name. That remarkable story, told in a recent issue of Georgia Backroads, was an experience that led Seals and others to create a new organization, Historic Rural Churches of Georgia. Its aim is to help promote their preservation. (And check out the stunning, beautiful book Historic Rural Churches of Georgia.)
The Georgia African American Historical Preservation Network, whose coordinator is Jeanne Cyriaque, also identifies and documents historic church structures, as well as schools, slave cabins, and praise houses that have served both enslaved and free African American communities around the state.
This is important work. It honors our kinship with others, free and unfree, who walked and worked and prayed on the land we inhabit, eventually ushering in a new society. We can never completely recover their stories, and certainly not their life experiences. But there is something ineffable about their churches, places where the human and the holy could come together. This was their glue.
Perhaps one reason for our fascination with rural churches is that they are relics of another time, rough-hewn and crafted by human hands, mysteriously full of meaning and purpose and intent. Looking back at us, they seem to ask, what do you believe? What do you worship? What do you care about? What faith holds your world together? What is your vision of tomorrow?
Our answers, if only we can find them, may be the truest measure of our worth.
This article appeared in an earlier form as part of “Jamil’s Georgia” on the SaportaReport.
Jamil Zainaldin is the president of Georgia Humanities.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] READ MOREThe slave dwelling project
[vc_row][vc_column][mk_fancy_title font_family=”none” el_class=”blog-titles”]The slave dwelling project[/mk_fancy_title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1592587602687{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]By Jamil ZainaldinThe 21st-century idea of sleeping in a slave cabin from the antebellum era is at first challenging to the mind and the memory. What’s the point? Who would choose to do this? But this is exactly what Joseph McGill Jr., the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, does.
Most slave cabins are now “gone with the wind,” although a number of them still exist, some modestly preserved and used for new purposes, some in ramshackle condition. “Finding, identifying, and authenticating slave dwellings in the South is an emerging trend in historic preservation,” says Jeanne Cyriaque, recently retired from the Historic Preservation Division, in the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
Historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor Joseph McGill is on a personal quest to sleep for a night in each of these slave dwellings. To date his journey has taken him to more than 60 such structures in southern and northern states (slavery existed in all of the original thirteen colonies and continued in the northern ones even for a time during their early statehood).
In Georgia, McGill has spent the night at a tabby slave cabin on Ossabaw Island, a wooden slave dwelling at the Wormsloe Historic Site near Savannah, and a circa-1850 wooden slave cabin located at the Sautee Nacoochee Center in northeast Georgia (it was moved from its original site in the Sautee Nacoochee Valley in White County).
Normally, McGill combines his investigations into slave dwellings with programs, demonstrations, and conversations in communities where the dwellings exist. His goals are complex. Not forgetting the past, especially a past that haunts the present (as well as our history), is important, he believes.
Acknowledging the existence of slavery in our past is one thing; remembering the enslaved individual is another. The historical record of the lives of slaves is thin, consisting of few records other than perhaps a bill of sale, a mention in an owner’s diary, will, or correspondence, or a detailed description as a “runaway” in the local paper. The personal identity of most slaves is—and remains—ephemeral, their particular trials and triumphs largely absent from the annals of human history.
Joseph McGill’s quest, in a sense, is our nation’s quest, too, in this 150th anniversary of the Civil War—the awful clash of forces on the land we peacefully live upon today. We may study that past, we may even reenact it as McGill also does (as a member of the famous 54th Massachusetts infantry regiment, one of the first official black units, and the unit portrayed in the film Glory).
But to abide in the dwelling place of a slave, to sleep on the ground and breathe the air in space once occupied by the unfree, is more than a symbolic act of re-joining. It is recognition of the primordial humanity that connects us all. Our dreams are the one thing nobody can take away. They occupy an intimate space that we share with the departed.
The sharing of a resting place is so personal yet so universal. There is something powerful in McGill’s unusual form of acknowledgment, so full of respect and remembrance in the living act that unites us all, and on the very ground, in the very abode where they and we are free to dream dreams, the final place where enslavement could not intrude.
This article appeared in an earlier form as part of “Jamil’s Georgia” on the SaportaReport.
Jamil Zainaldin is the president emeritus of Georgia Humanities.
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