Books
James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist
Coming February 15, 2024, from the University of Georgia Press, Michael L. Thurmond's latest book uses more than two decades of meticulous research, fresh historical analysis, and compelling storytelling to rewrite the prehistory of abolitionism and add an important new chapter to Georgia’s origin story.
Founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733, the Georgia colony was envisioned as a unique social welfare experiment. Administered by twenty-one original trustees, the Georgia Plan offered England’s “worthy poor” and persecuted Christians an opportunity to achieve financial security in the New World by exporting goods produced on small farms. Most significantly, Oglethorpe and his fellow Trustees were convinced that economic vitality could not be achieved through the exploitation of enslaved Black laborers.
Due primarily to Oglethorpe’s strident advocacy, Georgia was the only British American colony to prohibit chattel slavery before the American Revolutionary War. His outspoken opposition to the transatlantic slave trade distinguished Oglethorpe from British colonial America’s more celebrated founding fathers.
James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia uncovers how Oglethorpe's philosophical and moral evolution from slave trader to abolitionist was propelled by his intellectual relationships with two formerly enslaved Black men. Oglethorpe’s unique “friendships” with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano, two of eighteenth-century England’s most influential Black men, are little-known examples of interracial antislavery activism that breathed life into the formal abolitionist movement.
Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage, 1733–1865
Decades before Georgia became the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement, generations of its African Americans waged a historic struggle to abolish the institution of slavery. Michael L. Thurmond presents this unique, fascinating story of Black Georgia from the early eighteenth century until the end of the Civil War.
A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History
A Story Untold was born in a classroom in Clarke Central High School in 1971. An 18-year-old Michael L. Thurmond was a member of the first graduating class of the newly-consolidated Clarke Central, a merging of the all-black Burney-Harris High School and the predominantly-white Athens High School.
It was not until the summer between college and the start of law school that Thurmond initiated his effort to document the history of the black community in Athens, a history largely unknown and unrecognized. Over the ensuing years, A Story Untold emerged and was published in 1978.
Thurmond says, "We recognize that black history is American history. People of all races and colors understand that defining, documenting, and sharing our history benefits all of us. As Southerners, we are connected by a shared heritage and history."
A Story Untold is a compilation of nine written essays and one pictorial essay concerning the history of black men and women in Athens, Georgia. Each essay depicts either an individual contribution or the historical development of one of the major institutions within the Athens black community.