Browse Exhibits (13 total)
The Joseph Echols and Evelyn Gibson Lowery Collection
This exhibit features records from The Joseph Echols and Evelyn Gibson Lowery Collection, documenting the work of Joseph E. Lowery as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Evelyn G. Lowery’s founding and leadership of the SCLC/Women’s Organizational Movement for Equality Now (SCLC/W.O.M.E.N.). The Lowery Collection contains personal papers, sermons, speeches, correspondence, SCLC and SCLC/W.O.M.E.N. records, and hundreds of historical photographs and audiovisual records documenting the Lowery's struggle for justice and equality. Select materials from the collection will be digitized and made available through the Library’s institutional repository.
The Lowery Trust granted sole ownership of the collection to Morehouse College in March 2021. Shortly thereafter, the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library was formally designated as custodian of the collection with responsibilities for housing and providing access for students, scholars, researchers, and the global community.
View the The Joseph Echols and Evelyn Gibson Lowery Collection Exhibit here
The People's Mayor: Maynard Jackson and the Politics of Transformation
Maynard Holbrook Jackson, Jr. won the 1973 election, becoming the first African American mayor of Atlanta and of a major southern city. On his journey to the mayor's office, Jackson followed a path chartered by preceding generations of Atlanta's African American leaders. While in office, he steered the city and its residents on a new course of greater inclusion and opportunity for all citizens.
His election marked an important transformation taking place in Atlanta, the South, and the nation as a whole -- evidence of the growing number of African American voters at the ballot box and the resulting shift of political power in many major cities. Jackson's was the first strong-mayor administration created by the new 1973 Atlanta City Charter. During three terms as mayor, Jackson seized on the opportunity to transform city hall, realize his vision for a people's administration, and forever change the city of Atlanta.
This exhibit was developed by the Archives Research Center of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, the repository for the Maynard Jackson Mayoral Administrative Records. All materials in the exhibit are contained within the collection unless otherwise noted.
Women Who Changed Atlanta and the World
“The work of black club women contributed to the survival of the black community. Black women’s clubs were, like the clubs of white women, led by educated, often by middle-class women, but unlike their white counterparts, black club women frequently successfully bridged the class barrier and concerned themselves with issues of importance to poor women, working mothers, tenant farm wives. They were concerned with education, self and community improvement, but they always strongly emphasized race pride and race advancement. Their inspiring example of self-help and persistent community service deserves to be more closely studied by historians, especially those interested in urban history.”
Gerda Lerner, “Early Community Work of Black Club Women,” Journal of Negro History, April 1974.