National Congress of Colored Parents & Teachers

Atlanta, GA

Alpha Delta Pi was founded on May 15, 1851 at Wesleyan College in Macon — the first educational institution to grant an academic degree to a woman — making it the first secret society in the world for college women and the mother of the social sorority system. From that Georgia beginning the organization spread to campuses across the United States and Canada. This Atlanta building, dedicated in 1955, serves as its Memorial Headquarters honoring the founding.

Decatur, GA

For decades the Beacon neighborhood was the heart of Decatur's African-American life — a tight-knit community of homes, churches, schools, and Black-owned businesses clustered along Atlanta Avenue. Its schools served the community until the Decatur system integrated in 1967, and the neighborhood was leveled by urban renewal in the mid-1960s, leaving only a handful of buildings and one surviving business.

Madison, GA

When Madison incorporated two women's colleges in 1850 — the Baptist Georgia Female College and the Methodist Madison Female College — the town became one of the antebellum South's notable centers of female education. This building opened the Georgia Female College's first session with 148 pupils and later served as the president's house. A diverse curriculum drew young women from as far as Philadelphia, until the Civil War turned the facilities into hospitals and private education never recovered its former standing.

Meriwether County, GA

In the segregated rural South, Black communities were routinely denied a fair share of public school funding, so they built and sustained their own institutions through pooled money, donated land, and volunteer labor. The Odessadale Elementary School stands in that tradition of Black self-help — a community in Meriwether County, Georgia, investing directly in the education of its children when the state would not. Decades later, alumni and neighbors organized to preserve the site and honor the school's place in local memory.