Letter from citizen's fact-finding movement in Georgia

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dc.contributor.author Wilkins, Josephine
dc.date.accessioned 2014-04-08T11:36:26Z
dc.date.available 2014-04-08T11:36:26Z
dc.date.issued 2014-04-08
dc.identifier.other PO#: 40865
dc.identifier.other BIB ID#: 780657
dc.identifier.other ms/134-005; 84dfd9ab-a376-472b-ba02-86271e3ba12f
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10428/1537
dc.description Date: July 27, 1944 Format: Book Date Processed: 2014-04-08 en_US
dc.description.abstract This letter is from Josephine Wilkins to Calhoun Georgia newspaper Editor, J. Roy McGinty, thanking him for an editorial he wrote on civil rights for Negro citizens. Wilkins was an activist for many social causes in Georgia. Interestingly, McGinty is in The Dictionary of Georgia Biography but Wilkins is not. The letter makes a clear association between these two Georgians about twenty years before the integration of Georgia schools. The following brief biography comes from Documenting the South: "Josephine Wilkins was bom in Athens, Georgia, in 1893. Raised in a religious family, Wilkins began to challenge authority at a young age. She was educated at the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens before being sent to "finishing school." In the mid-1920s, after finishing her degree at the University of Georgia, she went to New York City to study art at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. While there she took a course in social science at Columbia University and decided to work more closely with people. In 1925, she moved back to Athens, Georgia, to work for the Georgia Children's Code Commission and worked on passing child labor laws. Around this time, Wilkins became increasingly involved in the League of Women Voters and, by 1934, she had been elected as the organization's state president. In 1937, Wilkins received a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation, which she used to start the Citizens' Fact Finding Movement (1937-1940) in order to promote awareness of issues pertinent to Georgia and its relationship to the South in general. In addition, Wilkins describes her perception of and involvement in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, founded in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1938. According to Wilkins, the Southern Conference sparked concern among government officials for its leftist leanings. Wilkins explains how communism was certainly a present, if not predominant, thread in the Southern Conference until the rise of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Wilkins also discusses her friendship with Jessie Daniel Ames and Ames's anti-lynching organization, the Commission of Interracial Cooperation, which disintegrated and was succeeded by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) in 1944. She remained involved on the executive board of the SRC until her death in 1977." en_US
dc.description.sponsorship Georgia Press Association en_US
dc.language.iso en_US en_US
dc.subject Integration en_US
dc.subject Civil Rights en_US
dc.subject Letters & Correspondence en_US
dc.subject Democracy en_US
dc.subject United States--Georgia en_US
dc.subject Roy McGinty en_US
dc.subject Georgia Press Association en_US
dc.subject The Calhoun Times en_US
dc.title Letter from citizen's fact-finding movement in Georgia en_US
dc.type Book en_US


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  • Civil Rights Papers
    Primary source documents relating to civil rights and integration in Georgia and the American South held by the Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections

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