Memorial to Seaborn Anderson Roddenbery -Cairo, Ga.
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dimples1
N 30° 52.702 W 084° 12.461
16R E 766959 N 3419462
A memorial to Seaborn Anderson Roddenbery which is located on the grounds of the Grady County Courthouse in Cairo, Ga.
Waymark Code: WM7F6Q
Location: Georgia, United States
Date Posted: 10/17/2009
Views: 3
Seaborn Roddenbery was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the state of Georgia. He was elected to the 61st Congress to replace the deceased James M. Griggs, and re-elected to the 62nd and 63rd Congresses before dying in office. Born on a farm in Decatur County, Georgia, Roddenbery attended Mercer University for three years, but was forced to withdraw due to family finances. In 1891, he was elected to represent his home district in the Georgia House of Representatives. After two terms, he was appointed professor of Language and Mathematics at South Georgia College. In 1894, after reading law and being admitted to the practice of law in Georgia, Roddenberry resigned his academic position. He spent the next few years building a private practice and networking within the Georgia political structure. During this time, Rodenberry was the president of the Thomas County, Georgia, Board of Education from 1895 to 1898 and was appointed to that county's court as a judge from 1897 to 1901.
The reputation Roddenbery had already garnered in Georgia as a skillful and inspiring orator was renewed in the nation’s capitol. Quick of both tongue and wit and possessed of a natural elegance of bearing and speech, he won the awe of fellow Congressmen who were amazed at how much he could fit the extremely limited speaking time he was often allotted on the House floor.
Roddenbery earned a reputation as an extreme conservative on fiscal matters. He was particularly militant in his opposition to increasing the pensions of Civil War veterans, a position mostly attributable to the fact that the thousands of surviving Confederate veterans in Georgia, a state that endured some of the worst destruction of the war, were ineligible for Federal pensions under the 14th Amendment and Georgians were adamantly opposed to having their tax dollars subsidize the pensions of former enemies.
Roddenbery's most lasting and damning reputation, however, was as an ardent believer in racial separatism, institutionalized white supremacy and as the nation’s most passionate opponent of mixed race marriages, views that were on the most conservative end even of the spectrum of the early 20th century. ( text taken from Wikipedia entry)
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