A Grateful People

About the Book

It was a dark time, but a light shone the way. It was a time of sadness, but also a time of joy. Green Grove was a place not only in terms of geography, but also in terms of a community with a mindset and paradigm of unparalleled and unending proportions. A Grateful People: An Historical Account of the Founding of a Community, chronicles the lives of the people who inhabited this piece of God’s green earth—Green Grove, Lumpkin, Georgia.

In Green Grove, some owned their land and taught their children to do the same, while others sharecropped and lived a different kind of life trying as best they could to eke out a living working for the landowner. They may have been working for a man who treated them differently while their parents taught them that being different did not make them less. It was because of Green Grove—the physical and psychological place—that the children who lived there were able to become productive citizens throughout the United States of America and the world.

A Grateful People chronicles the life of a place that broke through the challenges of the times to create a place of hope where dreams of success became a reality with hard work and perseverance.

About the Author

Willie Marie Porter was born in 1922 to parents who made a living in the Green Grove community as sharecroppers. She earned a master’s degree in education from Columbus State and taught for thirty-eight years in Georgia. She and her late husband, Houston G. Porter Sr., have two sons, three grandsons, and eight great-grandchildren.