Marietta in History
Hattie Gaines Wilson
1919-2001
Hattie G. Wilson was firmly in the corner of education. Her children attended Lemon Street High School just as she had, but when Marietta High School was desegregated in the mid-1960s, many of the African-American students felt lost. It was hard for them to leave their community school where they knew their teachers and their teachers knew them well enough to check on them if they were absent. Many of them dropped out, but Mrs. Wilson told her son, "You can go to school and finish with your class…or I can quit my job and we can go to school together…"
Mrs. Wilson worked in a variety of jobs after attending Paine College in Augusta. She was a maid, an insurance saleswoman and a school teacher. But she found her true calling when, after years of volunteering, she was hired in 1951 to work at the Fort Hill branch of the Cobb County Library System. At that time, the libraries were segregated and the African-American community made do with hand-me-downs from the Clark Library. Mrs. Wilson would borrow material needed by the neighborhood's college students and then open the library to them on Sunday. She began the first Black History collection in the state. The Fort Hill library moved into the vacated Lemon Street Elementary School in the early 1970s, and eventually it was renamed the Hattie G. Wilson Library.
A woman who devoted her life to education and community service, Mrs. Wilson was a member of the Marietta Housing Authority, acting as its chairman in the early 80s. Other activities included working to form the Tenants' Associations for Fort Hill, Johnny Walker and Clay Homes residents and serving on the YWCA board of directors. Her awards included the American Red Cross Volunteer of the Year, Eleven Alive Volunteer Honoree, Jefferson Award for Volunteering, and the Martin Luther King Jr. "Living the Dream" award. Hattie G. Wilson said it and lived it: "You can change things if you do it right."
Cobb County Oral History Series. Hattie Gaines Wilson Oral History.
Scott, Thomas A. Cobb County, Georgia, and the Origins of the Suburban South.
Felecca Wilson Taylor, daughter