Macon's Woodford to be keynote lecturer at Sachsman Symposium
Special to the Bell Ringer
Erica L. Woodford, superior court clerk of Bibb County and award-winning advocate for the Enslaved People Project, will deliver the signature Hazel Dicken-Garcia address Nov. 13 for the Sachsman Symposium on the Nineteenth Century Press at Augusta University’s Jaguar Student Activities Center.
Woodford, in partnership with Dr. Chester Fontenot Jr., director of Africana Studies at Mercer University, Stephanie Woods Miller, chief deputy clerk and Julie Grimm, clerk of Historical Preservation, leads a comprehensive initiative to catalogue and digitize thousands of records of slave transactions dating to the county’s earliest days in 1823 and continuing to the close of the Civil War.
“I am deeply honored to be invited to present at the Sachsman Symposium,” Woodford said. “The nineteenth century press and the courthouse records I work with are really two sides of the same coin—both are primary sources that tell us how a society understood itself, what it chose to document, and what it chose to ignore.”
Researching and archiving documents and press accounts just now emerging after more than two centuries motivate Woodford.
“Newspapers of the antebellum period regularly carried advertisements for the sale of enslaved people alongside coverage of politics and commerce,” she said. “The deed books in my office recorded those same transactions as routine legal business. Together, they reveal how deeply embedded slavery was in the fabric of daily life—not as an aberration, but as an institution that was covered, legalized, and normalized. Studying them side by side gives us a far more complete and honest picture of that era.”
Typical classified ad for the sale of enslaved people in the Macon Telegraph from November 1828. (image from Georgia Historic Newspapers)
More than a scholarly exercise to uncover and preserve a historical record, the Enslaved People Project seeks to provide important connections for individuals anxious to discover priceless perspectives on their own personal heritage.
Woodford is passionate about the enterprise now in its 13th year.
“These records are not abstract history,” she said. “They are the missing pages in real families' stories. For African Americans, whose genealogical trails were deliberately and systematically erased, a deed book entry may be the only surviving evidence that an ancestor existed. When we digitize and make these records publicly accessible, we are not just preserving history; we are restoring identity. That is urgent, living work.”
The winner of the 2023 Historic Preservation Award from the Historic Macon Foundation, Woodford is tireless in her efforts to share the results of the painstaking research. Outreach efforts have resulted in exhibitions at the Tubman Museum, Douglass Theatre and Canopy Gallery, and the work has been featured in Macon Magazine and on Georgia Public Broadcasting programming.
Woodford, a Macon native, earned her bachelor’s degree from Mercer University and her Juris Doctorate from Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. Before taking office, she spent nearly a decade in private practice and served one term as Associate Judge and Magistrate in Bibb County Civil and Magistrate Courts.
She is a member of the State Bar of Georgia, National Association of Court Managers, Downtown Rotary, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and is the incoming president of the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia. Woodford also serves as an adjunct professor at Mercer University Law School.
Sponsored by the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians and Augusta University’s Pamplin College of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, the 2026 Symposium features informative paper presentations and thoughtful panel discussions.
The event will take place in the Coffeehouse of the Jaguar Student Activities Center.
Past Dicken-Garcia Lecturers have included Clemson history professor Orville Vernon Burton and UNC-Wilmington history professor Angela Zombek.
This will be the 34th annual Sachsman Symposium, which originated at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1993. It is named for the late David Sachsman, who founded the symposium and helped publish nine books of conference papers. Panels and presenters from the symposium have also been shown on C-SPAN from time to time.
For more information about the Symposium or the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians, please visit the organization’s website at:
