John Oliver Killens (1916–1987), an influential essayist, novelist, screenwriter, and teacher, was born in Macon. Co-founder of the Harlem Writers Guild and a vice-president of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, Killens worked as a teacher and lecturer at many schools and universities, including Fisk, Howard, and Columbia. His first novel, Youngblood (1954), tells the story of an African American family’s struggles in the fictional town of Crossroads, Georgia, during the Jim Crow era of the 1920s; it has been reprinted several times, most recently in 2000 by the University of Georgia Press. Killens’ novels And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963) and Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971) were each nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.  His other books include the essay collection Black Man’s Burden (1965); a novel about the life and work of poet Alexander Pushkin, Great Black Russian (1989); and two books for young readers, Great Gittin’ Up Morning: A Biography of Denmark Vesey (1972) and—recounting the adventures of John Henry—A Man Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man (1975). John Oliver Killens died in Brooklyn, New York in 1987. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)

Glenn T. Eskew has served on the faculty at Georgia State University since 1993. A native of Birmingham, Eskew earned his BA at Auburn University and his MA and PhD at the University of Georgia. In 1997 the University of North Carolina Press published his But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, and it received the Francis Butler Simkins Prize of the Southern Historical Association and Longwood College. Eskew also has published two edited volumes, Paternalism in a Southern City (about Augusta, Georgia) and Labor in the Modern South, both with the University of Georgia Press. His latest book is Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World, to be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2013.

Ralph McGill (1898–1969) was arguably Georgia’s most influential journalist of the twentieth century. During forty years at the Atlanta Constitution as an editor, publisher, and daily columnist, he built a national following as a white Southern editor who questioned segregation and challenged the demagogues who exploited it. His journalistic courage earned McGill a reputation as “the conscience of the South.” He began working at the Atlanta Constitution in 1938 and in 1942 was named editor-in-chief. By the late 1940s, McGill’s columns appeared regularly in national magazines such as Saturday Review, Saturday Evening Post, New Republic, and Atlantic Monthly, and in 1957 McGill increased his national reach when a syndicate began circulating his column to hundreds of newspapers. He won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing and the prize committee singled out his piece “A Church, a School” for special mention. Then, for McGill’s having “courageously sounded the voice of reason, moderation, and progress during a period of contemporary revolution,” President Lyndon Johnson honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. (Inducted in 2004)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to be awarded a Harvard PhD. He spent nearly a quarter century on the faculty of Atlanta University as professor of history and sociology (1897–1910) and head of the sociology department (1934–1944). Du Bois’ writings and his intellectual guidance as teacher, researcher, and editor at Atlanta University contributed immensely to its reputation as a preeminent resource for the study of race in America. In 1903 he published his now-classic collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, named as one of the Modern Library’s one hundred most influential works of the twentieth century. Du Bois spent twenty-three years as editor of Crisis, a publication of the NAACP—an organization he helped found. During his second span at Atlanta University he became the first editor-in-chief of Phylon, the University’s scholarly review of race and culture, to which he was also an ardent and frequent contributor. (Inducted as a charter member in 2000)