Here’s some news from Gallup-Healthways Inc. about the poll they have been doing since 2008 ranking the states with the highest and lowest well-being index that covers,
Purpose-like what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals;
Social-having supportive relationships and love in your life;
Financial-managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security;
Community-liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community;
Physical-having good health and enough energy to get things done daily.
Georgia’s ranking in 2013 was number 27 in the 50 states. The 2013 Purpose rating was 13; Social rating was 18; Financial rating was 23; Community rating was 35; and Physical rating was 38.
Georgia’s ranking in 2014 took us down to 30 in the 50 states. The 2014 Purpose rating was 21; Social rating was 16; Financial rating was 47; Community rating was 37; and Physical rating was 25.
The number 1 state for 2014 in the US was the State of Alaska. They jumped several numbers to become number 1. Georgia slid 3 numbers to 30th in the nation.
This poll was devised by the Gallup and Healthways Groups to show the well being of the people in each state in all aspects from health to finances. And Georgia clearly has some problems to overcome before it can become a true key player. This poll was devised with the support of the Chamber of Commerce of each state to find out how their states were performing overall nationally.
Here are the top 10 states in the nation in ranking: 1. Alaska; 2. Hawaii; 3. South Dakota; 4. Wyoming; 5. Montana; 6. Colorado; 7. Nebraska; 8. Utah; 9. New Mexico; 10. Texas.
Here are the lowest 10 states in the nation in ranking: 41. Missouri; 42. Michigan; 43. Arkansas; 44. Tennessee; 45. Alabama; 46. Mississippi; 47. Ohio; 48. Indiana; 49. Kentucky; 50. West Virginia.
An article for the Henry County Community News Blog from a long time Ellenwood resident.
On February 17, 2015 at the Henry County Board of Commissioners meeting I watched these people take away some of the rights of private property owners and this will be met in court when certain businesses want to come into the area and are denied. Fairview has always been a quiet and nice little community that didn’t need all the hype it is receiving as of late. My husband said it is a lot of sh*&t and he is not the only person who feels this way. We moved to this area in 1983 from Atlanta to get away from the problems that were feeding that area. Now we see the same problems growing here. When taking property rights from owners who might have an opportunity to sell a piece of their property to a business such as a pawn shop then it is getting to the point of dictatorship and appeasing a certain sector of the society. This leads to more corruption and more under the table deals of people in the area wanting a property fixed to put in a park or
other place such as this doctors complex. Many are asking questions as to how much money was put under the table to fill the accounts of those in power. My neighbor told me to look at a website and see how they are trying to make this Atlanta instead of where we live. This is the kind work that has hurt this county in the past because they are looking out for themselves and their ego driven purposes. Wonder when property owners take the county to court over this issue will it still be the in thing. We are not Atlanta and we will never be.
Alice Cummings
Ellenwood Resident
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Here is another in the series on Black History Month about Mr. Lucius King.
Mr. Lucius King was the brother of Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and uncle to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Mr. King wasn’t one to be out front when all was happening during the Civil Rights movement. He was born in Stockbridge, GA in September 1899. His brother Michael (Daddy King) was born in 1897 according to the Census of 1900.
Lucius attended school to the third grade and then began working at odd jobs around town to help out with the family. He was harassed by the white supremacists of the day and made his life miserable here.
His sister Lenora had married and moved to Griffin, GA and so Lucius left Stockbridge about the time their Mama died and he lived with his sister and her husband for a while. He had gotten a job digging ditches for the road crew in the Griffin area. He was a shy and bashful person who didn’t say much or want to be in the forefront of things happening in the area. His brother Michael (Daddy King) had moved to Atlanta and became a minister which was his life’s calling. But for Lucius he wanted to live a simple life and he moved down to Madison, GA.
He did not realize that this area was a hot spot for the KKK. Morgan County was ripe with them and he had to be very careful especially in later years. If they had known he was related to Dr. King, Jr. he would have likely been hunted down and lynched as a retaliation towards him. Lucius was working in the framing of houses at this time and kept a low profile.
Lucius was hurt by the assassination of his nephew in Memphis and went to Atlanta to be with Daddy King and his wife at the time to be with the family. Afterwards, he went back down to Madison. By this time his health was getting bad and he didn’t work as much as he had once did. In October 1970, Lucius King passed away in Madison. This was only a few days after Coretta King had MLK, Jr. moved to where the King Center was being formed. So, they laid Lucius in the vacated spot of MLK. Daddy King and his wife Roberta would be buried just above him at South View Cemetery in Atlanta.
Lucius was a proud man and had every right to be. He worked the best he knew how and at hard work during his life. He followed his father’s footsteps in working hard to make a living. One of the silent parts of the King family not heard in history.
Continuing with the series on Black History Month I want to cover James Weldon Johnson a man who would be a special man in the is History of the Black People.
James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of Helen Louise Dillet, a native of Nassau, Bahamas, and James Johnson. James' maternal great-grandmother, Hester Argo, had escaped from Saint-Domingue during the revolutionary upheaval in 1802, along with her three young children, including (James Weldon Johnson's grandfather), Stephen Dillet (1797-1880). Although originally headed to Cuba, their boat was intercepted by privateers and they were brought to Nassau, Bahamas instead. There they permanently settled. Stephen Dillet was the first man of color to win election to the Bahamian legislature in 1833.
James' brother was John Rosamond Johnson, who became a composer. The boys were first educated by their mother (a musician and a public school teacher) before attending Edwin M. Stanton School. His mother imparted to them her great love and knowledge of English literature and the European tradition in music. At the age of 16, Johnson enrolled at Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college, from which he graduated in 1894. In addition to his bachelor's degree, he also completed some graduate coursework. During this time, he needed money so he taught at the black school in Stockbridge, GA. While there he worked to instill in the people at Trinity Methodist Church what their Civil Rights meant to freed slaves. He molded the very people who would teach Michael King, Sr. (Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr.) about Civil Rights and the meaning of freedom. James was a young man with many talents who finished college by the age of 20.
The achievement of his father, headwaiter at the St. James Hotel, a luxury establishment built when Jacksonville was one of Florida's first winter havens, inspired young James to pursue a professional career. Molded by the classical education for which Atlanta University was best known, Johnson regarded his academic training as a trust. He knew he was expected to devote himself to helping black people advance. Johnson was a prominent member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.
Johnson and his brother Rosamond moved to New York City as young men, joining the Great Migration out of the South in the first half of the 20th century. They collaborated on songwriting and achieved some success on Broadway in the early 1900s.
Johnson served in several public capacities over the next 40 years, working in education, the diplomatic corps, and civil rights activism. In 1904 he participated in Theodore Roosevelt’s successful presidential campaign. After becoming president, Roosevelt appointed Johnson as United States consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela from 1906 to 1908, and to Nicaragua from 1909 to 1913.
In 1910, Johnson married Grace Nail, whom he had met in New York City several years earlier while working as a songwriter. A cultured and well-educated New Yorker, Grace Nail Johnson later collaborated with her husband on a screenwriting project.
After their return to New York from Nicaragua, Johnson became increasingly involved in the Harlem Renaissance, a great flourishing of art and writing. He wrote his own poetry and supported work by others, also compiling and publishing anthologies of spirituals and poetry. Owing to his influence and his innovative poetry, Johnson became a leading voice in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
He became involved in civil rights activism, especially the campaign to pass federal legislation against lynching, as southern states seldom prosecuted perpetrators. Starting as a field secretary, he became one of the most successful officials in the NAACP; as executive secretary, he helped increase members and reach by organizing new chapters in the South. During this period, the NAACP was mounting frequent legal challenges to the southern states disfranchisement of African Americans at the turn of the century by such devices as poll tax, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and white primaries.
Johnson died in 1938 while vacationing in Wiscasset, Maine, when the car his wife was driving was hit by a train. His funeral in Harlem was attended by more than 2000 people. When Mr. Johnson died a great man with a great man died that day. A man with a clear vision. And part of his life was spent right here in Henry County, GA.
Here is another for the series on Black History Month about the late Ms. Helen DuBose
Ms. Helen DuBose passed away on January 24, 2015 at the age of 95 and was a great person in the History of the Black People. She was believed to be the first black woman in the United States to garner an agriculture degree and was widely recognized for her work in the ways to do organic farming. Helen DuBose had gone on to earn two master’s degrees in agriculture and agriculture economics from the Tuskeegee Institute. Helen lived for 32 years on her 12 acre McDonough blueberry farm called Healing Acres.
Helen DuBose was given the 2013 Georgia Organics award named the Barbara Petit Pollinator Award. The Executive Director Alice Rolls said she contributed so much to the farming culture in Georgia. Helen was definitely a legendary farmer and agricultural teacher and gave inspiration to so many, especially young African American growers exclaimed Ms. Rolls. Her work with the land has left a legacy that history will tell and future farmers will benefit.
Helen DuBose was covered by the local paper back in 2010. She commented that farming was her life. She said that farming is part of us and that farmers have always been the backbone of America. Helen grew up on a shade tobacco farm. This farm produced tobacco for cigars. She remembered how hard it was for black farmers in the early 20th century. She realized from childhood that a black sharecropper was at the bottom of the pile except on tobacco farms. She wanted to learn more about farming and also in the process help those sharecroppers she saw everyday. She felt she wanted to grow up and see that a better chance for a better living at farming for the black people.
Helen became the first person in her family since slavery to continue through school beyond the sixth grade. She was the first in her family to graduate from college getting a bachelor’s degree in 1941 at Florida A&M. She would become the first black woman in the country to earn such a degree. When she left college she went back to farming. She cultivated some 40 acres that she purchased from her grandfather close to Thomasville, GA. She also went on to teach high school English in the area. Helen also worked for the USDA with the agriculture migrant workers in the Everglades of Florida. As World War II came, she taught programs to increase farm output for the war effort. During the whole time she worried about the lives of black farmers. She said that people don’t understand the inequity that exists between the government entities as far as black farmers are concerned.
She wanted her blueberry farm to give the young generation a spearhead to appreciate farming. As she said you can’t live a day without something from the farm. She felt that young people are getting a better and healthier view of farming and the needs of the farmers than they once had. Some are born to be farmers and they should be respected for doing so.
Our world has be blessed to have Mrs. DuBose in our midst. She has taught many a lesson and has brought forth food for the tables of the uncounted. Her blueberry farm was exceptional and we will miss her. The first time I met her was in 1983 when she was 64 years young and still going. She was a dynamo in the farming industry and will always be remembered for bringing forth a Black Woman of Substance to the world of agriculture. McDonough lost a legend when she recently passed away.
References:
1. Agriculture of America
2. The State Archives.
3. The Henry Herald Newspaper.
4. Lemon Funeral Directors
Here is another part of Black History Month that has a tragic ending.
Not all of Black History has been a shining glory and much of it has been treated with sinister hands. This is the condensed story of Mr. Jerry Banks, a black man wrongfully accused of a murder of two white people in 1974. And his ending is not a happy one.
Jerry Banks lived on Banks Road between Rock Quarry Road and Flippen Road. The road being named for his family. On November 7, 1974, Jerry Banks went out hunting with his dog and found two dead bodies those of Marvin King 38 band director at Jonesboro High School and Melanie Ann Hartsfield 19 who attended Clayton Jr. College and was one of King’s former students. Mr. Banks found their bodies on a lonely dirt road in a very rural part of Henry County. Each had been shot with a shotgun. Their bodies had been dragged about a hundred feed from where the shooting occurred into the weeds and covered with a blanket. Marvin King’s car was then driven off and abandoned in a field three miles away. Melanie Hartsfield’s car was found at Mays Corner in the Food Giant shopping center.
Jerry Banks happened upon the bodies and was scared right then and went up to Rock Quarry Road and flagged down a motorist to get them to call the police. Almost, exactly one month after the murders Jerry Banks was arrested for the crime. Basically because he was a black man and a perfect person in the eyes of the police to have committed the crime. Banks went on trial in January and on January 31, 1975 just four days after the trial started he was found guilty of the crimes and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His inept lawyer saw that his client was charged by not putting on a proper defense. He would later be disbarred for poor practices as an attorney at law.
Jerry Banks sat on death row for some three years as another team went to appeal the sentence and it was still upheld. So, a group went in and took the case to the Georgia Court of Appeals who over turned the previous convictions because the police had concealed evidence. He was retried and found guilty again and sentenced for the deaths of King and Hartsfield. In 1980, Banks had a new group of pro-bono lawyers who took the case to the Georgia Supreme Court and introduced some more new evidence that was not allowed in the original trial. The Court over turned the sentence and released Jerry Banks. The Henry County District Attorney said he would go for another trial until presented with some more findings and he dropped the idea.
On December 22, 1980, Jerry Banks was a free man. He had been imprisoned for a double murder for over six years, three of those on death row in the state penitentiary. Jerry Banks joyously returned home and was reunited with his wife and three children. He soon discovered though that his wife had fallen in love with another man and wanted a divorce. After all that had happened to him Jerry Banks couldn’t handle this jolting news. He was suffering terrific headaches; he was mentally and emotionally crushed; and he was afraid of losing custody of his children. So, on March 29, 1981, Jerry Banks pulled out a pistol and shot his wife and then himself. He died instantly, but his wife lingered for a month in a coma before passing away. Jerry Banks last written words were, “They had taken all that I had, all that I held dear to me.”
Since, that time no one has ever been convicted of the crime of killing Marvin King and Melanie Ann Hartsfield. That murder is still unsolved. A black man’s life was ruined by this murder also. Mr. Charles Sargent has written a very indepth account of the events surrounding the murder of Marvin King and Melanie Anne Hartsfield and the subsequent death of two more Jerry Banks and his wife in “The Sins of Henry County.” This was a terrible tragedy for a black family here in Henry County. This is a story for Black History Month that many don’t like to hear, but it needs telling.
Continuing more on Black History Month we will focus next on Ms. Carrie Mae Hambrick a woman of essence and a legend in her community. She was an inspiration to many a generation and Stockbridge is the better for her being here. The following resolution by the State of Georgia tells the story pretty well.
14 LC 103 0884
H. R. 1850
- 1 -
House Resolution 1850
By: Representatives Douglas of the 78th, Scott of the 76th, Stephenson of the 90th, and
Strickland of the 111th
A RESOLUTION
1 Commending Carrie Mae Hambrick and recognizing May 17, 2014, as Carrie Mae Hambrick
2 Community Service Day at the state capitol; and for other purposes.
3 WHEREAS, Carrie Mae Hambrick was born on March 8, 1919, in Jonesboro, Georgia, to
4 the late Emma Dixon-Slaughter and Jacob "Jim" Slaughter; and
5 WHEREAS, she received her formal education at the Dixon Grove School in Clayton County
6 and worked as a manager of the lunch room program at the former Red Oak School; and
7 WHEREAS, Mrs. Hambrick was united in love and marriage to Hime Hambrick, Sr., and
8 was blessed with five wonderful children, Otha, Brenda, Irene, Hime, Jr., and Alvin, five
9 remarkable grandchildren, Jerald, Jason, Shundra, Shalum, and Ryan, and four cherished
10 great-grandchildren, Jacob, Maya, Cameron, and Jahria; and
11 WHEREAS, in September of 1949, Mrs. Hambrick became the proud proprietor of the
12 Greenfront Café located in Stockbridge, Georgia; when it was built in 1947 by her cousin,
13 Augustus Slaughter, it was one of the first restaurants in the City of Stockbridge; and
14 WHEREAS, not only was the Greenfront Café known throughout Henry County for the best
15 hot dogs, hamburgers, and country cooking, but Mrs. Hambrick was also known for her
16 generosity toward others and her willingness to put the needs of her neighbors first; and
17 WHEREAS, she collected clothes, shoes, and household items to give to needy families in
18 the community and often provided food to families and took homemade soup to the sick and
19 shut-in; and
20 WHEREAS, one of Mrs. Hambrick's greatest enjoyments was watching neighborhood youth
21 play baseball, so she organized and sponsored the Stockbridge Pirates baseball team and laid
14 LC 103 0884
H. R. 1850
- 2 –
…………………………………
Here is the Obituary for Ms. Carrie Mae Hambrick
Family-Placed Death Notice
HAMBRICK, Carrie Mae Carrie Mae Hambrick Mrs. Carrie Mae Hambrick, age 90, passed away peacefully on Sunday morning, January 17, 2010. The service celebrating the memory of her life will be held Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 1:00 p.m., Red Oak United Methodist Church, 3894 Walt Stephens Rd., Stockbridge. Rev. Fert Richardson, pastor. Interment Stock- bridge Cemetery. Her remains will lie in state at the church from 11:00 a.m. until the hour of service. The family will receive friends tonight from 7:00 to 8:00 at Trinity United Methodist Church, 112 Wilson Ave., Stockbridge. She is survived by three daughters, Otha Bryant (John), Brenda Shaw (Rufus) and Marilyn Irene Hambrick; two sons, Hime Hambrick, Jr. (Elaine) and Alvin Hambrick; six grandchildren, four great grandchildren, a sister, three brothers, and a host of nieces, nephews, other relatives, the Stockbridge Community, and many friends. W.D. Lemon & Sons Funeral Home, 300 Griffin St., McDonough,
(770) 957-4337.
Published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from Jan. 18 to Jan. 22, 2010
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The City of Stockbridge Made a special day for Ms. Hambrick
The Stockbridge City Council created the 2nd Saturday of May of each year is Carrie Mae Hambrick Day as created by the Council in January 2009. She will be long remembered by future generations as a woman of substance who raised a family and worked hard in a family restaurant known as the “Green Front Café.” Stockbridge is indeed indebted to her legacy as a woman who brought about changes in her community with her loving ways and by being just herself.
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References:
1. Georgia State Legislature.
2. The Atlanta Journal Constitution
3. City of Stockbridge
