African American life during the time of Reconstruction in Greene County

These are images of Greene Countians who were overcomers. They withstood slavery and they embodied the African American quest for freedom. When award-winning historian Jonathan Bryant wanted to document the difficulty Black people have faced to overcome the systems of oppression in this nation after the Civil War, he focused on Greene County. In the conclusion of Bryant’s gripping book How Curious A Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, 1850-1885, he names the need to celebrate the everyday African American heroes of Greene County and also its history-making leaders – figures such as Abram Colby, born enslaved, who testified to Congress about being terrorized by the KKK for serving in the Georgia State Senate immediately after the Civil War, and the Rev. Adam Daniel Williams, grandfather of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born enslaved in Greene County, who was the first president of the Atlanta NAACP and the second pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.