RALPH EMERSON McGILL (1898-1969)

Ralph McGill was an American journalist and an anti-segregationist editor at the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. He received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959. His book The South and the Southerner (1963) was re-published by University of Georgia Press in 1992. McGill received honorary doctorates from dozens of universities and colleges, including Harvard, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In his honor, The McGill Lecture is held annually at The Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia, featuring a nationally recognized journalist. His personal papers are available at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University Library. McGill’s role in the campaign against segregation is depicted Michael Braz’s opera, A Scholar Under Siege, composed for the centenary of Georgia Southern University and premiered in 2007. The Best of Ralph McGill: Selected Columns, edited by Michael Strickland, was published in 1997.

A plantation owner who vowed to “write what is, even if it is unpleasant,” Julia Peterkin revolutionized American literature in the 1920s by writing seriously about the lives of black farmers. In five bold, lyrical books she pushed the bounds of realism to earn the startled praise of such intellectuals and literary artists as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In 1929 Peterkin became the first Southern writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her best-selling novel Scarlet Sister Mary.

Green Thursday, Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin chronicle the collapse of plantation agriculture in South Carolina, using the Gullah language in a literary way and portraying the points of view of black workers rather than their white owners. At the same time, Peterkin’s stories are often the thinly veiled autobiography of a southern white woman struggling to create something new out of the beauty and sorrow around her. Roll, Jordan, Roll, with text by Peterkin and photographs by her friend Doris Ulmann, is now one of the most hotly-collected documentary volumes of the twentieth century.

Peterkin paved the way both for the Southern Renaissance and for later African American writers.

Lillian Smith (1897-1966)

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born in Jasper, Florida in 1897. When her father’s Florida businesses failed in 1915, the Smith family came to Rabun County, Georgia, where her father had recently acquired property on Screamer Mountain and where he opened a summer camp for girls. At first Lillian worked with her family to create the camp, but with her father’s blessing, she soon became the owner and director of Laurel Falls Camp for Girls. This institution continued until 1949 and developed quite a reputation for being a progressive and well-rounded camp for young women, not only throughout the South, but across the country.

Lillian Smith emerged in the 1940s at the forefront of the Southern debate on segregation, where she was at least a decade ahead of other white liberals and stood virtually alone in calling for an immediate end to segregation laws and practices. Meanwhile, she was developing her talents as a fiction-writer. Her 1944 debut novel, Strange Fruit, was about a secret interracial love affair in a small Georgia town. In 1949 she published Killers of the Dream, a brilliant psychological and autobiographical work warning against the evils of segregation. Before her death in 1966, Smith would go on to publish several more books, fiction and nonfiction, and numerous articles and essays on social justice and racial equality, all of which were written from her home on Screamer Mountain.

Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was involved in numerous writing groups while in Chicago, including the South Side Writers Group, where she was a close colleague of Richard Wright. When in 1942, Walker’s poetry collection For My People won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, Walker became the first African American woman to receive a national writing prize. In 1975, Walker released three albums of poetry on Folkways Records – Margaret Walker Alexander Reads Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes; Margaret Walker Reads Margaret Walker and Langston Hughes; and The Poetry of Margaret Walker.  The Margaret Walker Center in Jackson, Mississippi, founded as the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People by Walker in 1968, is an archive and museum dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African-American history and culture, that also seeks to honor Walker’s academic and artistic legacy. Walker’s books include the poetry collection This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989), the novel Jubilee that might be read as a companion fiction to Gone with the Wind, and the award-winning poem, “For My People.”