If the measure of a man is the distance they travel in life, then without fail I can say Robert Richard Wright was a great man. He was born into slavery in Dalton Georgia on May 16, 1855. The aftermath of the Civil war brought with it great possibilities for the once enslaved. He attended the Storrs School. The school would later be called Atlanta University. In 1988 it would become Clark Atlanta University. It is said that while he was at Storrs School retired Union General Oliver Otis Howard Asked what message should he take to the North? A young Wright filled with the possibilities and aspirations of his age told the general, “Sir, tell them we are rising’. This phrase would become the battle cry of an oppressed people that has inspired books and even a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier.

Wright did indeed rise. He was the valedictorian at Atlanta University’s first commencement ceremony in 1876. His next step was to become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He filled his time with becoming a professor and later president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. He even showed his versatility and became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church during this time.

 In 1891 he became the first President of Georgia State Industrial College (what is now known as Savannah State University) a historical black college. He developed the curriculum after studying Booker T. Washington and reading W E B Dubois and others. The curriculum included both classical liberal arts and a vocational education.   He became a leader in the new black higher education movement. His connections and presence brought visitors and lecturers to campus such as Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Walter Barnard Hill, Lucy Craft Laney, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.  Even two U.S. presidents William McKinley and William Howard Taft visited the campus and spoke to students during his tenure as president.

During the Spanish American War he joined the Army. In 1898 President McKinley appointed him a Major and paymaster of the United States Army. These two positions were of prominence for an African American. He was the first black paymaster and the highest ranking African American officer. Because the war was short he served less than a year with honor.

He would continue as president of the Georgia State industrial College (Savannah State University) for thirty years. At the end of his term over four hundred students now attended. This was a far cry from the eight with which he started.

But Wright did not retire he was still rising when he entered the business world in 1921 He started the Philadelphia's Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company the only African-American-owned bank in the North. Being a banker he founded the Negro Bankers Association, the first African-American banking association. He showed remarkable fiscal skills because under his leadership, the bank withstood the Great Depression. The bank was sold ten years after his death. The bank had accumulated assets of $5.5 million.

One of his most significant accomplishments was his plan to celebrate February 1 each year to celebrate the signing of the 13th amendment to the U S Constitution which freed all slaves. One year after Wright's death in 1947, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed a bill to make February 1 National Freedom Day. The holiday proclamation was signed into law on June 30, 1948, by President Harry Truman. The passage of National Freedom Day set the groundwork for Black History Month to be established in 1976 a practice the famed educator Carter G. Woodson started in 1926.

The rising did not stop with him but continued with his daughter Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre. She too earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She became the first full-time African-American teacher in the Philadelphia public-school system. She served as a senior high-school principal and as the first female president of the Philadelphia Board of Education. At the age of 80, she established the "Tell Them We Are Rising" program, promising to pay college tuition for 116 sixth-graders in two poor North Philadelphia schools if they completed high school.
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Robert Richard Wright measures tall amongst men and serves as reminder for all of us as long as we are rising we can accomplish many things.
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Rosemary Daniell is not technically history because she is alive and well but because she has already made a significant mark on our world I thought I would go ahead and include her. Rosemary Daniell  was born in Atlanta in 1935. She dropped out of high school and married an army cook. Because he was abusive she divorced him and remarried an architect, Sidney Daniell, in 1956. She had two daughters with Sidney. They divorced in 1968 she married Jonathan Coppelman, also a writer in 1969. She and Coppelman divorced in 1976.

In the midst of this chaotic life in the late 1950s and early ’60s she found her calling. She took a continuing education at Emory University and fell in love with poetry. The gods of poetry visited her and she began to write poetry Along the way she met James Dickey, the Southern writer of poems and the famed book Deliverance, at a writers’ workshop and was influenced by him. But she was to find herself drawn to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton too.

The year 1975 was a pivotal year Daniell. Her mother committed suicide and her alcoholic father died. But it was also the year her first poetry book was published ‘A Sexual Tour of the Deep South.’ This became a feminist must-read, as she took on subjects not usually discussed in poetry and the South. This was followed by her second book of poetry ‘The Feathered Trees.’ After two more poetry books she wrote the first of two memoirs: Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide In the Deep South. This book won the 1999 Palimpsest Prize for as the most requested out-of-print book. Her next memoir was Sleeping With Soldiers. Her memoirs again broke ground as she explored subjects of which ladies were not expected to speak.  It is said by some critics that they were a forerunner of the current memoir trend.

She would have been a literary icon with these works but what she did next was start a movement with her book on the subject of writing. She developed a reputation as one of the best writing coaches in the country. She wrote two books on the subject. These books were The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing And Living Tthe ZONA ROSA Way and Secrets Of The ZONA ROSA: How Writing (And Sisterhood) Change Women’s Lives.

Zona Rosa was the name of the first writer’s group she formed in Savannah thirty years ago. She invited four women to meet once a month to talk about writing and life at her little apartment.  Today, thousands of women, and some men, have participated in Zona Rosa workshops; Rosemary leads Zona Rosa workshops and retreats all over the country, as well as in Europe, where they are dubbed "Pajama Parties for Grown-Up Girls with Smarts". Over 150 Zona Rosans, and counting, have become published authors. Among these are Cassandra King, author of THOSE SAME SWEET GIRLS, and other popular mainstream novels; John Berendt, who was part the Savannah Zona Rosa group while writing his multi-best-seller, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL; best-selling New York Times author Bruce Feiler, who consulted with Rosemary before publishing his first book, LEARNING TO BOW; and Eric Haney, who took part in the Atlanta Zona Rosa group while writing INSIDE DELTA FORCE, which became the basis for the television series, "The Unit."

Today there are SUB ROSA, or Secret of the Rose peer groups  forming all over the States. ZONA ROSA THE MUSICAL, written by Zona Rosans Pamella Smith and Kathleen McGuire, is now looking for a theatrical home. Daniell’s  own ZONA ROSA THE SIT COM is in the works.

Along the way she has received many awards, among them two NEA grants, one in poetry, another in fiction. She has reviewed books for The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Time, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and been published in such magazines as Mother Jones, Harper’s Bazaar, Self, Travel and Leisure, New York Woman, and other magazines, as well as many literary publications. She has also appeared on a number of national radio and TV shows. In 2008, she was given a Governor’s Award in the Humanities for her impact on the state of Georgia. She was profiled in Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-75. She has become a literary feminist icon and yet she still is pushing ahead into new lands.

And what does Zona Rosa mean: the ‘pink zone’. Rosemary Daniell definitely deserves credit for opening up the pink zone for all to enjoy.

Mathilda Beasley was born in New Orleans November 14, 1832 as a slave. She moved to Savannah in the 1850s. In Savannah she opened an Underground School for black children before the Civil War. The penalty running an Underground School for a black teacher, whether slave or free, was a $100.00 fine and up to thirty-two lashes with the whip in the public square. This did not deter her. She married a successful businessman in 1869 and when he died in 1877 she gave most of her money to the Catholic Church and traveled to York, England to become a nun. After completing her training she tried to enter the Franciscan order and was unsuccessful. Why? One suggestion is Mathilda’s husband, Abraham, owned property on Skidaway Island and it is believed that Mathilda Beasley lived there at some point. In November of 1884, a group of Franciscan nuns called the “Poor Clares” worked with the African Americans on Skidaway Island. One of the nuns had been a member of an order in York and this may have been her inspiration to become a novitiate of the York order.

But determined to continue her work she returned to Savannah in 1886 and opened one of the first orphanages for African-American girls in the United States. To accomplish this she started an order called the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis; it was the first African American order in Georgia. The orphanage was called the St. Francis Home for Colored Orphans. These activities led to her being known throughout Georgia and elsewhere as Mother Mathilda. In the late 1890s the orphanage moved to East Broad Street. The orphanage shared this site with St. Benedict the Moor Parish Church.

Mother Mathilda was closely associated with the Sacred Heart Church to which she had given her landholdings after her husband’s death. In the mid-1880s the church gave her a cottage at 1511 Price Street that was her home until she died in 1903. In the home she began to sew, giving her proceeds to poor blacks.

On Dec. 20, 1903 "Mother Beasley" was found dead kneeling in the cottage’s private chapel. Nearby were her burial clothes, funeral instructions and will. People of all faiths attended her funeral filling the church to the brim. She asked no eulogy be spoken at the service in accordance with her life of simplicity and humility. This of course did not stop the newspaper from calling her “the idol of the poor, especially among the Negroes.” She is buried at Savannah’s Catholic Cemetery on Wheaton Street.
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Her legacy continues through the Sacred Heart Church Mother Mathilda Beasley Society. The Society promotes charitable programs and raises awareness of African-American contributions to the Roman Catholic Church. The City of Savannah dedicated a park in memory of Mother Mathilda in 1982. Her home was restored and moved to the East Broad Park that sits across from St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church. A historical marker on the site recounts her many good deeds. The home and marker sit in a park with playground, community center, basketball courts, dog park, and walking trail. The world was given a Mother Theresa and Savannah was given its own Mother Mathilda.
 
 
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One of the unsung heroines of Savannah is Susie Baker King Taylor. She was born in Liberty County on August 6, 1848. She was the daughter of slaves. When she was seven she was sent to Savannah to live with her grandmother. And even though she was not allowed to have an education by the decree of the state of Georgia, what I call the Underground School Movement taught her. These were schools outlawed by state decree but that taught slaves in secret.

In 1862 during the Civil War she fled to St. Simon’s Island which was occupied by Union troops. Her education led the Army officers to obtain books for her to organize a school to teach the recently freed African American students. This made her the first black teacher for freed African American students in a freedmen's school in Georgia. She taught there for over a year.

For the next three years she traveled with the 33rd United States Colored Troops. She would write of her adventures in a book called Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. She would be the only African American woman to write of her experiences. In 1866, now married, she returned to Savannah where she started a school for the freed children. In 1868 she taught freedmen, supporting herself through small tuition charges and not accepting pay from the northern freedman’s aid organizations.
In the 1870s she went to Boston to work as a domestic servant of a ‘Brahmin’ family. She would remain in Boston for the rest of her life. In Boston she became involved in the Women’s Relief Corps as a nurse. She became president of this group, which gave assistance to soldiers and hospitals. Some have called her as influential as the better known Clara Barton. In her time traveling with the 33rd Regiment and now as President of the Women’s Relief Corps she was influential in recruiting Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth in her efforts.

Although her life was dedicated to serving others and brought her some fame, she is buried in an unmarked grave in Mount Hope Cemetery in Massachusetts. She wrote in her memoirs “We hope for better conditions in the future and feel sure they will come in time, surely if slowly.” This quote was emblematic of her undying belief that you could change things even in the worst of times. Maybe one day Savannah can erect a monument to celebrate her life and time in Savannah and beyond.
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