Guide to Women's Collections at the Richard B. Russell Library: Political Figures

The "Political Figures" tab consists of women who were involved with political campaigns, party politics, and unelected government officials, as well as those who were observers of or participants in major historical events. 

Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter-Gault graduating from the University of Georgia. 

The Ellen Cullen McCormack Campaign Advertisements consist of one 16mm film containing three presidential campaign television spots from 1976, for pro-life candidate Ellen Cullen McCormack.  

The Patricia Collins Butler Collection includes documentation of the romance and engagement of Patricia Collins and Richard B. Russell, Jr., in 1938. You can find a recording of Butler discussing Russell here. 

Louise Blemant Suggs held positions with the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta assisting with international relations and protocols and was an honorary member and secretary of the Atlanta Consular Corps. Her papers document her career and include printed materials, correspondence, memoranda, organizational files, photographs, artifacts and audiovisual materials.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault was born in Due-West, South Carolina in 1942. Hunter began her studies in journalism at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In 1961, after a two-year legal battle, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became the first African Americans to be accepted to the University of Georgia. In 1963, Hunter graduated from UGA with a degree in journalism. Hunter-Gault’s professional career in journalism included work for The New Yorker and The New York Times. She served as a foreign correspondent for African, the Middle East, and the Caribbean for PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report. In 1997, she became NPR’s chief correspondent for Africa, and in 1999, became Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent for CNN. This collection consists of papers, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and artifacts documenting the personal life, education, and career of Charlayne Hunter-Gault. The collection includes records pertaining to the integration her tenure as national correspondent and anchor for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from 1979 to 1988, and her reporting from South Africa and other nations as a foreign correspondent for NPR and CNN in the 1990s. 

Eunice Lastinger Mixon was born in Tifton, Georgia, in 1931 to a family of farmers. She married Albert Mixon in 1948, and beginning in 1956 she attended the University of Georgia, attaining a master’s degree and specialist degree in education. She taught eighth-grade science, and high school biology, chemistry and physics for thirty years in the Tift County School System, and was an instructor at the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. In 1974, gubernatorial candidate George Busbee, acquainted with Mixon  through his advocacy for teachers in the legislature, appointed her as his Tift County campaign chairman, and her success at grassroots organizing gained her a reputation as a valuable political ally in South  Georgia. Since then she has campaigned for President Bill Clinton, Senator Sam Nunn, Congressmen Charles Hatcher and Roy Rowland, and Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Tommy Irvin. She served as a delegate to the 1988 and 1992 National Democratic Conventions, and as a member of the Georgia Democratic Executive Committee. The papers document Mixon’s involvement with the state and national Democratic Parties, her appointment to several state boards and commissions, and community activities in Tifton, Georgia. Her oral history can be found here.