W. W. Law was a crusader for justice and the civil rights of African Americans. He served as president of the Savannah chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1950 to 1976 and came to be widely known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” Born on January 1, 1923, in Savannah, Westley Wallace Law was the only son and the oldest of the three children of Geneva Wallace and Westley Law.

Walter McElreath was an Atlanta-based attorney, banking executive, legislator, and the founding president of the Atlanta Historical Society (today the Atlanta History Center). McElreath played a significant role in the city’s cultural and business life throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Early Life & Politics Walter McElreath was born to William A. McElreath and Matilda Jane McEachern on July 17, 1867, in Cobb County. He worked on his father’s farm throughout his youth, attending school seasonally and participating in local debate societies.

A native of Atlanta, Walter White served as chief secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 to 1955. During the twenty-five years preceding the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, White was one of the most prominent African American figures and spokespeople in the country. Upon his death in 1955, the New York Times eulogized him as “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T.

William C. Pauley, a landscape architect, designed numerous parks and college grounds in Georgia and the Southeast during the twentieth century. In 1919 he became the first landscape architect to establish a practice in Atlanta. Among his most important projects in the state are the Gardens at Bankshaven in Newnan and Hurt Park in Atlanta. Courtesy of Spencer Tunnell The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print.

A. T. Walden was a noted attorney, a civil rights leader, and one of the New South’s first Black political power brokers. His life spanned nearly eighty turbulent years of southern history, when racial segregation and restrictions on Black voter participation were common practices. One of the few Black lawyers in Georgia during the civil rights era, Walden litigated civil rights cases to help equalize pay for Black teachers in Georgia.