Ann Woolner

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

It's no longer remarkable for a woman or an African-American—or someone who's both—to hold a powerful position. Leah Ward Sears wants people to realize how abnormal, and how difficult, it was not that long ago. And it's not all that easy now.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

Never has senior U.S. District Judge Marvin H. Shoob made more clear his view of his job than during a contentious hearing in the case of an Atlanta banker accused of fraud for funneling money to arm Iraq.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, the son of a railroad laborer and a cook, neither high school graduates, Larry D. Thompson is still amazed at where life has led him.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

Growing up in the 1940s and '50s in Opelika, Alabama, her father a farmer, her mother a teacher, Chilton Davis Varner assumed she'd help build her husband's career and raise a family.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

When Atlanta lawyer Austen T. Walden came to LaGrange to speak in 1945, a high school senior named Horace T. Ward was in the audience. The teenager had never heard of an African-American lawyer.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

Jim Butler had been in business as a solo practitioner for a single day in 1979 when he took a phone call from Forsyth County Sheriff Wesley Walraven, whose campaign he'd helped run three years earlier. Walraven told Butler that a woman whose brother had been hurt badly in a car wreck had been trying to reach him.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 17, 2015 | Daily Report Online

When Miles Alexander came to work at Kilpatrick, Cody, Rogers, McClatchey & Regenstein in 1958 after a teaching stint at Harvard Law School, he joined Atlanta's largest firm. It had 14 lawyers.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 16, 2015 | Daily Report Online

When told she couldn't come to court, a white girl in a Southern town sneaked up to the courtroom's "colored" balcony in the 1930s to see her father defend an unpopular client.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 16, 2015 | Daily Report Online

For Ben F. Johnson III, there was no doubt he'd become a lawyer. "Some of my earliest memories are of my father taking me to court with him," he says.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read

June 16, 2015 | Daily Report Online

Laughlin McDonald snagged his first job out of law school at a resort on Hilton Head Island, where the two previous summers he'd been hired to sing ballads at the resort's bar.

By Ann Woolner | Special to the Daily Report

5 minute read