After Emancipation in 1865, Black reformers in Athens–and across the South–worked to build schools, churches, and other institutions to promote literacy, professionalism, land ownership, and well-being. They relied on mutual aid, community strength, and assistance from northern philanthropists to do this work in the context of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan (Harty, 2020; McPherson, 2025; Thurmond, 2019). These 19th– and early 20th-century reformers rarely called themselves “social workers,” but their efforts to build, protect, and enhance capabilities in their communities provide powerful examples for social workers today.

As Michael Thurmond (2019) writes in A Story Untold, Black Athens was a vibrant community with politicians, journalists, educators, business people and more. Though Thurmond writes about Judia Jackson Harris and her efforts to increase Black landownership in rural Clarke County, the full story of social welfare reform in the Athens Black community is yet to be told. Among the stories told here are those of Judia Jackson Harris and Martha Bass Holsey, who spent the bulk of their lives in Athens–and also those of Janie Porter Barrett and Mary Jackson McCrorey, who were born here, but invested much of their reform-focused energy elsewhere. The stories on this page are just the beginning.