Terrell County, Georgia: History
Formed from portions of Randolph and Lee counties on February 16, 1856, by an act of the Georgia General Assembly, Terrell County is named for William Terrell of Sparta, Georgia, who served in the Georgia General Assembly and the United States House of Representatives.
During the American Civil War, after Atlanta's capture by Union forces, a refugee settlement was established in Terrell County for civilians forced to flee the city. The Fosterville settlement, named after Georgia Quartermaster General Ira Roe Foster, was according to author Mary Elizabeth Massey in her 2001 history, the "most ambitious refugee project approved by the Georgia General Assembly" [during that period]. On March 11, 1865, the Georgia General Assembly authorized General Foster to "continue to provide for maintenance of said exiles, or such of them as are unable by their labor to support themselves, or their families for the balance of the present year."
During the civil rights era of the 1960s, the local white minority resisted change, sometimes violently; it subsequently became known as "Terrible Terrell County". In 1958 the county refused to register a group of African-Americans including several teachers with bachelor's and master's degrees on the grounds that they couldn't read, and a college-educated marine who was refused registration on the grounds he could not write intelligibly. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the county was ordered to allow them to register, but they did not immediately comply. In 1960, testimony showed that Black voters were given more tests, and more difficult ones, than White voters, and that illiterate Whites were allowed to vote while well-educated Blacks were falsely determined to be illiterate. The county asserted that this was not discriminatory. In September 1962, an African-American church was burned down after it was used for voter registration meetings. (Note: Like other Southern states, Georgia had disenfranchised most Blacks at the turn of the century by rules raising barriers to voter registration; they were still excluded from the political system.) That month Prathia Hall delivered a speech at the site of the ruins, using the repeated phrase "I have a dream." Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. attended her speech; afterward, he also began to use that phrase, including in his noted "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.