Voting Rights

Congressman Andrew Young and his son Bo run down the hallway of the Rayburn House of Representatives Building in Washington in June, 1975.

Atlanta Mayor-elect Maynard Jackson makes a speech on election night on October 3, 1973 at the Sheraton-Biltmore Hotel in Midtown.

For a brief and tumultuous few weeks in 1946 and 1947, Georgia had three governors. What followed is the stuff of political legend.

Born and raised in segregated Atlanta, Martin Luther King, Jr. grew to be the leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement and was recognized worldwide for his campaign of nonviolent social change. In 1955, while a pastor in Montgomery, he began his struggle to end segregation.

Andrew Young came to Atlanta in 1961 to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) after serving as a pastor in Thomasville and leading voter registration drives.

Elected mayor of Atlanta in 1973, Maynard Jackson was the first African American to be mayor of a major Southern city.

Any Great Change explores the decades-long struggle for women’s suffrage as well as the key groups, their strategies, and their leaders.

For the first time since our founding nearly a century ago, Atlanta History Center served as an early voting location and a polling place on November 3, 2020.

This is a landmark year for American democracy—2020 marks both the centennial of women’s suffrage as well as the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. The right to vote was hard-won by our forebearers.

In August 2020, we commemorate the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment which guaranteed American women the right to vote. However, this was not an inclusive victory.

The suffrage movement did not end with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Securing the vote was just part of what Georgia’s suffragists aimed for.  

When the citizens of Georgia elected Andrew Young to the US House of Representatives in 1972, there had not been a Black congressperson elected from Georgia since Jefferson Franklin Long in 1871.

We are losing a generation who brought about sweeping social change as teenagers in the 1960s. Constance “Connie” Curry, Congressman John Lewis, and Rev. C.T. Vivian are just three towering Atlantans who have recently died. Often, as they go, so do their stories.

The deaths of Atlanta’s own Constance “Connie” Curry, Congressman John Lewis, and Reverend C.T. Vivian signal the ongoing passage of responsibility to those of us who are making history today. The legacies of these three key figures of the Civil Rights Movement live on in the works of contemporary Atlantans.