In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for Time Magazine, attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university—a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students "for their own safety," and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order. Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book—a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.

Phinizy Spalding traces the development of Georgia's oldest medical school from the initial plans of a small group of physicians to the five school complex found in Augusta in the late 1980s. Charting a course filled with great achievement and near-fatal adversity, Spalding shows how the life of the college has been intimately bound to the local community, state politics, and the national medical establishment. When the Medical Academy of Georgia opened its doors in 1828 to a class of seven students, the total number of degreed physicians in the state was fewer than one hundred. Spalding traces the history of the Academy through its early robust growth in the antebellum years; its slowed progress during the Civil War; its decline and hardships during the early half of the twentieth century; and finally its resurgence and a new era of optimism starting in the 1950s.

Published in 1951, this study looks at the social, economic, political, and historical aspects of the development of higher education for African Americans in Georgia.

"While Puckett offers a valuable perspective on schooling in the twentieth-century rural South, she also captures the essence of daily life in the communities in which she taught. We read of how she sometimes boarded with the parents of her pupils; of how teachers, students, and parents joined together in observance of holidays; and of how schooling managed to continue through the busy growing seasons. Personal details of Puckett's life also emerge, from her relationship with her parents to her life at home with her husband and their eight children.".

Thomas G. Dyer’s definitive history of the University of Georgia celebrates the bicentennial of the school’s founding with a richly varied account of people and events. More than an institutional history, The University of Georgia is a contribution to the understanding of the course and development of higher education in the South. The Georgia legislature in January 1785 approved a charter establishing “a public seat of learning in this state.” For the next sixteen years the university’s trustees struggled to convert its endowment--forty thousand acres of land in the backwoods--into enough money to support a school. By 1801 the university had a president, a campus on the edge of Indian country, and a few students. Over the next two centuries the small liberal arts college that educated the sons of lawyers and planters grew into a major research university whose influence extends far beyond the boundaries of the state. The course of that growth has not always been smooth. This volume includes careful analyses of turning points in the university’s history: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of land-grant colleges, the coming of intercollegiate athletics, the admission of women to undergraduate programs, the enrollment of thousands of World War II veterans, and desegregation. All are considered in the context of what was occurring elsewhere in the South and in the nation.

This Georgia Rising is a study of Georgia's political changes in the decade of the Second World War and in the postwar years of the 1940s. Georgia's political establishment underwent challenges in the 1940s in everything from Georgians defending the state's university system from attacks by Governor Eugene Talmadge to challenges by Georgia's larger cities and towns to the state's county unit system to the early postwar stirrings of the modern civil rights movement. An array of progressive forces--including Georgia's veterans of the Second World War, college and university students, newspaper editors and reporters in the state's larger circulating newspapers and smaller town newspapers--fought for change in some of the state's political institutions, culminating in the 1942 election of Governor Ellis Arnall and in 1945 the changes to the state constitution. This Georgia Rising is a detailed study of the gubernatorial races of the 1940s as they are interwoven with the larger political and social changes of wartime and then postwar Georgia. This book draws not only from Georgia's larger circulation newspapers but also focuses on its smaller circulation newspapers and especially its African-American newspapers, including The Atlanta Daily World and The Savannah Tribune. This Georgia Rising offers a detailed and rich narrative of a decade of far-reaching change in twentieth-century Georgia. --Publisher description.

Illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, a detailed and comprehensive history of Berry College, located in northwest Georgia, reviews its humble beginnings in 1902 as a trade school for rural Appalachian youth to its present-day standing among the Southeast's best liberal arts colleges.

As turbulent social and economic changes swept the South in the first half of the twentieth century, education became the flashpoint. Ann Short Chirhart's study is the first to analyze such modernizing events in Georgia. She shows how these changes affected the creation of the state's public school system and cast its teachers in a crucial role as mediators between transformation and tradition. Depicting Georgia's steps toward modernity through teachers' professional and cultural work and the educational reforms they advocated, Chirhart presents a unique perspective on the convergence of voices across the state calling for reform or continuity, secularism or theology, equality or enforced norms, consumption or self-reliance. Although most teachers, black and white, shared backgrounds rooted in localism and evangelical Protestantism, attitudes about race and gender kept them apart. African American teachers, individually and collectively, redefined traditional beliefs to buttress ideals of racial uplift and to press for equal access to public services. White women adapted similar beliefs in different ways to enhance their efforts to train greater numbers of white students for professional and wage labor. Torches of Light is based on such sources as government archives, manuscript collections, and interviews with teachers. As Chirhart examines the ideas over which Georgians clashed, she also shows how those ideas were embodied in New Deal and U.S. Department of Agriculture programs, the political activities of the black Georgia Teachers and Educators Association, and the Georgia legislature's 1949 Minimum Foundation Act. Through two world wars and the Great Depression, teachers sought to reconcile clashing beliefs not only to renegotiate class, race, and gender roles but also to enhance their own professionalism and authority.

In Statesboro, Georgia, two schools coexisted: one white and the other black. Yet, these schools were intertwined by their geographical location and the traditions of the segregated South. There are many glaring similarities between the white students of Georgia Southern University's forerunner, the First District A&M School, and the black students of the Statesboro Industrial and High School. Yet as happened all too often in the South as implementation of the federal court's desegregation orders took shape, "Negro" schools were downgraded or outright closed. Statesboro was no different. While, First District A&M became a regional university, Statesboro Industrial and High School was downgraded to a junior high school. In 1961, integration on the higher-education level at Georgia's flagship university captured national attention. Few works if any have examined desegregation in the context of non-flagship universities. Likewise, there is a misguided mythology that desegregation occurred quietly at Georgia Southern University: it's clear that while there was not the violence and rioting seen elsewhere in Southern universities, blacks were marginalized and did not feel welcome at the college. A passive group after the initial integration, blacks adopted tactics of protest and confrontation to empower themselves. Taking a page from the Civil Rights Movement, black students and faculty established organizations to confront discrimination and gain access to campus leadership positions. This is a story about the defeats, victories, struggles, and developments of blacks at Georgia Southern University.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.