Tag: African Americans

The Formation of Georgia: Beginnings of Evil, or An English Experiment Gone Awry

Above: Early layout of Savannah This is an excerpt from The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, by Donald L. Grant. Available from University of Georgia Press. About the book At the age of 52, my father received his PhD in History from the University of Missouri and accepted a position at Fort Valley State College (now University), a public HBCU in Middle Georgia south of Macon. Throughout his tenure and beyond, he worked on what turned into a monumental history of Black Georgians. Unfortunately, he died in 1988 without getting it published. After his death, I reviewed his work. Recognizing its value, I editing the massive 1,500-page manuscript down to publishable length and extended the narrative’s…

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When my father died, I inherited a huge unfinished manuscript. The rest is history.

By Jonathan Grant @Brambleman The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia was honored as an Editor’s Choice by American Heritage magazine and named Georgia’s nonfiction “Book of the Year” in 1994. I accepted the award on my father’s behalf six years to the day after he died. The last narrative that Dad wrote for The Way It Was covered Hosea Williams’s 1987 marches in Forsyth County, Georgia, the all-white county infamous for its purge of more than 1,000 black residents 75 years previously. My new novel, Brambleman, is a fictional account of that purge–and people’s attempts to come to grips with it. It is very much a story about the burden of Southern history. The Way It Was has been…

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Finishing my father’s life’s work: It’s not just a job, it’s an indenture

Original Caption: Grant says his father’s book is inextricably linked to other facets of his life. He was scouring page proofs of The Way It Was in the South when his wife went into labor with their second child—son Nathan (shown above). This is the story behind a Georgia Book of the Year. Ah, yes, I remember it well. I was sitting in the delivery room marking up page proofs when Judy’s situation suddenly required my complete attention. I tell people that while Nathan may look young (he’s a college freshman now), he was born during World War I. Dad would like that. The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia was honored as an Editor’s Choice by American Heritage magazine and named…

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