The road to a slave-free Georgia: the little-known history of state founder James Oglethorpe

Thursday night, Michael Thurmond held court in the decorous, genteel salon of the British consulate in Atlanta, describing nearly 20 years of scholarly research behind his latest work: a history of James Oglethorpe, the abolitionist founder of the Georgia colony in America.

Eight hours later, Thurmond took off his professor hat to don an austere white DeKalb county baseball cap, a reminder that he gets to tell cops and firefighters what to do. In addition to being a respected historian and the author of James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia , Thurmond is also chief executive officer of DeKalb county, leading the government of Georgia's fourth-largest county and the largest with a Black majority.

After his book reading earlier that day, he was directing a 4am relief operation to bring several tons of fresh produce to Augusta in relief from Hurricane Helene.

The 71-year-old attorney's body of work extends beyond the sort of self-serving campaign autobiography written by aspiring politicians. Thurmond wrote Freedom: Georgia's Antislavery Heritage, 1733–1865 and A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History while serving as Georgia's labor commissioner – the first African American elected as a non-incumbent to a statewide office in Georgia since Reconstruction.

He has carved out a history of his own as a stabilizing force in Georgia politics, often brought in as a fixer to sort out dysfunction. Over the years, he has directed Georgia's division of family and children services, and served as labor commissioner and superintendent of DeKalb schools. Thurmond's nuts-and-bolts governance informs James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia as much as his meticulous research into the life and legacy of Georgia's founder, which began with an off-chance encounter with Oglethorpe's statue in England.

"One eight-word affirmation captured my attention," Thurmond said. "It was: 'He was the friend of the oppressed Negro,' and that plaque had been carved and erected in 1785," the year Oglethorpe died.

Thurmond didn't believe it.

References to Oglethorpe abound in Georgia: the eponymous college, street names, a pink marble bust adorning the state capitol stairs, a bronze statue in Savannah's Chippewa Square. But no monument in Georgia says a word about Oglethorpe's strident opposition to the practice of slavery. Thurmond set out to examine his legacy in a state bound to an ideology of the Confederate "lost cause" that expunged acknowledgement of abolitionist leadership.

"You can't align James Oglethorpe with Jefferson Davis," Thurmond said. "It would have been impossible for the lost cause historians, who argued that slavery was a benign institution, to then bring in Oglethorpe, who spoke very forcefully. Oglethorpe believed that it was immoral, ungodly and barbaric to enslave people."

James Oglethorpe was born in 1696 into a prominent Surrey family and attended Oxford University before embarking on a military career fighting the Turks. He subsequently joined parliament and earned a reputation advocating for the oppressed, particularly the imprisoned, and the plight of debtors.

"Oglethorpe is a major figure in Georgia's early colonial history but he is not well known in Britain," said Rachel Galloway, consul general in Atlanta. "With the approach of the 250th anniversary of American independence and Michael Thurmond's fresh take on Georgia's first governor, there is an opportunity for more Brits and more Americans outside of Georgia to learn about Oglethorpe's complex journey from slave trader to abolitionist."

A letter from an enslaved man in Maryland, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, led to a reception in England that solidified Oglethorpe's resistance in parliament to the institution of slavery, turning him from being merely anti-slavery to abolitionism even as the practice of slavery enriched England, Thurmond said.

"He was the first, in my estimation, to speak out against the evils of the transatlantic slave trade," Thurmond said. "A hundred years before William Wilberforce convinced parliament to abolish slavery in the British empire, Oglethorpe was a man ahead of his time."

In 1732, Oglethorpe received a royal charter to create the colony of Georgia, which he imagined at first as a refuge for the poor and an alternative to debtors' prisons. Georgia was for a time the only English colony that explicitly prohibited slavery. Thurmond's book unflinchingly examines the failure of that vision in practice, as Savannah plantation owners eroded the norms against practicing slavery while contending with the threat of Spanish Florida to its south.

Oglethorpe returned to England after successfully repelling a Spanish invasion of the colony. When he left, his abolitionist influence rapidly dissipated. Oglethorpe died believing he had failed in his mission, Thurmond said: "But in fact, we live in a slave-free Georgia. Oglethorpe succeeded and the people who opposed him failed."

His book is about Oglethorpe's journey and the evolution of his beliefs, and what that might tell contemporary readers about how leaders stand against the moral – or immoral – forces around them. "See, none of us end up where we start out," he said. "Just think about your life and how you view people of color or white people or people of any race and nationality. How did that develop? Or heterosexual and gay relations? How did that develop? I tell young people, if you want to change the world, change yourself. Because if you just change yourself, you have, by definition, changed the world."