Chapter 1: Roots in Athens, Georgia (1856–1875)

Wiley was born into that shadow.

He came into the world just five years before the Civil War began, during the final, most desperate years of American slavery. His earliest memories were likely of labor—whether his own or that of others—and of a people trying to endure under the crushing weight of white supremacy.

He was only five years old when the first Confederate bullets flew, and nine when the South fell. His childhood unfolded in whispers and explosions—the quiet scraping of hoeing fields, the murmurs of mothers praying, and the distant thunder of war rumbling closer each season.

And then came freedom.

Or something like it.

When the war ended in 1865, Wiley was nine years old, standing at the threshold between bondage and possibility. What followed was not peace, but Reconstruction—a time of burning churches, federal troops, new schools, and old hatreds repackaged in laws and fists.

Wiley’s family, like so many others, scraped by with little to their name but everything to hope for. Economic opportunity was limited. Schooling was rare. But the church stood firm—a sanctuary for spirit, community, and power.

In the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) tradition, Wiley found something lasting: faith, structure, identity. These were not luxuries—they were tools for survival. In brush arbors and clapboard churches, he learned the rhythms of gospel songs and the thunder of righteous words.

The men in his community tilled red Georgia soil by day and sang freedom by night. The women raised children, taught scripture, and held families together with callused hands and unshakable dignity. Wiley learned from both.

By the time he reached adulthood in the mid-1870s, Georgia had changed—but not enough. The promise of Reconstruction was already slipping away, choked by white backlash and Black Codes. But Wiley was not naïve. He was forged in fire.

At eighteen years old, on December 10, 1875, he married Dinah Hawkins.

She was only thirteen—a girl by age, a woman by labor, by faith, by necessity.

Together, they would build something stronger than law.

They would build a family.

Chapter 2: Building a Life Amid Reconstruction (1875–1900)

Wiley J. Strickland was only nineteen years old when he married Dinah Hawkins in the winter of 1875.

She was just thirteen—barely past childhood, but already shaped by the rough calculus of postwar Georgia, where Black girls became women by force, not choice. Together, they stood before God and kin in Clarke County, and began a journey not of comfort, but of commitment.

They were married in a season of political betrayal. The promise of Reconstruction—so briefly flickering after emancipation—was being snuffed out across the South. Federal troops were gone. The Klan had returned. And new laws made clear that Black families would be free only in name.

Still, Wiley and Dinah persevered.

They planted crops—likely corn, cotton, or sorghum—on rented land. They raised chickens, grew okra and sweet potatoes, and stretched every coin until it bent. Wiley worked sunup to sundown as a field laborer, sometimes hired by the day, sometimes stuck in the debt spiral of sharecropping.

Their home was modest. Wooden walls. A dirt floor swept clean. A fire burning low through winter nights. But it was theirs.

By 1880, they were living in Athens’ Sandy Creek district, a Black farming enclave where faith, discipline, and kinship held families together in the face of legalized second-class citizenship. The census listed Wiley as a farmer, Dinah as a housekeeper, and their children as the beginning of something enormous.

Thirteen children. Willie, Olivia, Wiley Jr., Josephine, Alfred, Alice, Viola, Asberry, Rhoena, Raymond, Samuel, Eula, and last but not least: Professor “Fess” Strickland, their tenth.

Each child born not into wealth—but into structure. Into love delivered through order, through chores, through call-and-response prayers and songs sung under breath while shelling beans. Dinah ran her house like a sanctuary and a drill camp. Wiley worked the fields with quiet force, then came home to enforce his rules—shoes off before entering, mouths shut at supper, respect for your mother at all times.

He was not a loud man, but he carried the weight of his name like a stone in his hand. He expected his children to do the same.

They didn’t own their land. They didn’t vote without fear. But they built something durable with what they had: routine, reverence, and rhythm.

Every Sunday, they attended church. Wiley sat ramrod straight in the pew. Dinah led the younger children in humming spirituals. The older boys knew not to sleep during the sermon. The girls helped cook after service. Their faith was not ornamental—it was armor.

Through droughts, poor harvests, and the creeping stain of Jim Crow, the Stricklands endured.

They were not broken.

They were becoming a dynasty of the dirt—a family rooted deeper than any law could reach.

And Wiley, with his weathered hands and strict eyes, was at the center of it all.

Chapter 3: Through the Fire of Jim Crow (1900–1920)

By the dawn of the 20th century, Wiley J. Strickland was no longer just a father.

He was a patriarch.

He had raised thirteen children, all of them disciplined, rooted, and taught to survive. Some had already left Clarke County, chasing opportunity in cities like Atlanta or Indianapolis. Others stayed close, raising babies of their own under Wiley’s steady, unbending gaze.

And through it all, the world around him turned darker.

Jim Crow had arrived in full.

Voting became a trap, with poll taxes and literacy tests waiting behind smiling officials. Schools for Black children crumbled while white ones gleamed. Lynchings were no longer hidden—they were advertised. The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre sent shockwaves through every Black household in Georgia. Men were shot in the streets. Women were raped. Homes were burned.

Wiley heard the stories. He may have known the victims.

But he did not leave.

He stayed.

In Clarke County, on that patch of land and memory, he and Dinah held fast to what they had built. Their home was crowded with kin—grandchildren now sharing bedrooms with uncles, great nieces learning to sweep the porch the way Dinah taught decades before.

The 1910 census captured their growing empire. Wiley and Dinah were still in their home, still farming, still commanding respect. Multiple generations passed through that doorway. Some stayed, some left, all of them knew: Birch Street hadn’t been built yet, but the dynasty had already begun.

In the evenings, Wiley may have sat in a rocking chair near the fire, polishing his shoes with slow, meditative hands. His eyes, still sharp. His voice, still commanding. He may have listened to his sons argue about moving north. He may have said nothing at all—just watched, knowing each child would have to choose between danger and dignity, between land and liberation.

His daughter, Professor “Fess” Strickland, had grown into a tall, broad-shouldered force. He watched her command a room the same way he once commanded a field. Her nickname—a mistake turned prophecy—carried power. He may not have said it aloud, but he knew: she would carry the family forward.

Through sermons, through supper, through loss and laughter, Wiley taught without speeches.

He taught through presence.

He taught through survival.

And as the country plunged into World War I and the first waves of the Great Migration emptied Georgia’s backroads of Black families, Wiley stayed planted.

Because someone had to.

Because the roots had to hold.

Chapter 4: A Life Remembered (1920–1946)

In his final decades, Wiley J. Strickland watched the world change again—this time, in footsteps.

His children began to leave Georgia.

They packed suitcases and boarded trains bound for Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, and Lansing. They were part of the Great Migration, a wave of Black southerners fleeing lynch law and sharecropping for factory floors and Northern streets. They carried little with them—only faith, memory, and the stories Wiley had poured into them.

He did not go with them, not at first.

But he watched.

He watched as his grandchildren were born with new names in new cities, but still moved with the same fire. He watched as Professor “Fess” Strickland, his daughter of daughters, rose into her own myth—coal-woman, matriarch, mayor of Birch Street.

And eventually, he did follow—not in a train car, but in heart, in memory, in blood.

In 1946, at ninety years old, Wiley passed away. His body finally gave out, though his spirit had long stretched beyond Georgia’s red clay.

Later that same year, Dinah passed too—his wife of over seventy years, the woman who bore thirteen children, sang over pots of greens, and ran a household like a general in an apron.

They had lived through slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, lynch law, two world wars, and the rising thunder of a Civil Rights movement still just forming.

They had not been given freedom.

They had earned it, one year, one crop, one child at a time.

Wiley was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing, Michigan, beside the woman who had been his right hand and his foundation. There was no statue. No newspaper obituary. No grand eulogy.

But his name lived on in every Davenport, every Strickland, every descendant who stood a little taller because he had held the line.

He had raised children who would migrate, survive, and thrive.

He had walked when others ran, planted when others fled, endured when others collapsed.

And in doing so, he passed on the most sacred inheritance:

A name.
A faith.
A story.