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Tybee Talks • “Restoring General James Oglethorpe’s Original Vision”
February 6 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST
Tybee Talks is a FREE lecture series featuring topics that are relative to our surrounding and history. This event is in partnership with the Tybee Island Historical Society.
Michael Thurmond served as the CEO of DeKalb County, Georgia, From 2017 to 2024 and was a finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2025 for his book James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia. He has also authored Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage, 1733-1865 and A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History. Thurmond held various political positions, including Georgia legislator, director of the Division of Family and Children Services, labor commissioner, and superintendent of DeKalb schools. In 1997, he became a distinguished lecturer at the University of Georgia.
In this talk, Thurmond will be discussing the research surrounding his book James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist.
James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia uncovers how Oglethorpe’s philosophical and moral evolution from slave trader to abolitionist was propelled by his intellectual relationships with two formerly enslaved Black men. Oglethorpe’s unique “friendships” with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano, two of eighteenth-century England’s most influential Black men, are little-known examples of interracial antislavery activism that breathed life into the formal abolitionist movement.
Utilizing more than two decades of meticulous research, fresh historical analysis, and compelling storytelling, Michael L. Thurmond rewrites the prehistory of abolitionism and adds an important new chapter to Georgia’s origin story. In this discussion, Thurmond brings this history to light.
