Jim Wooten, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- At the age of 12, the young Wilcox County farmer Melvin Everson made his first big-league speech at a Future Farmers of America gathering at Atlanta’s Sheraton Biltmore hotel.
By the time he settled in at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) in Tifton, the young Everson had been cured of the desire to take up his father’s occupation of farming the family’s 176 acres between Rochelle and Abbeville. At one time, he was the most likely of the 10 children of Northern and Willa Everson to stay on the farm, though he jokes now that “that second row of cotton I picked made me decide that farming was not the life for me.”
The speeches that he might have made over the hood of a John Deere now have a larger audience — and next year will have a larger audience still.
State Rep. Melvin Everson, now of Snellville, hopes to be the first black Republican to win statewide office in Georgia. He’s running for state labor commissioner, an office Democrat Michael Thurman is rumored to be leaving to run for lieutenant governor.
