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Grant Blankenship

All content by Grant Blankenship
On Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 22 people, originally from 15 different nations, took the Oath of Allegiance to become United States citizens at the William Augustus Bootle Federal Courthouse in Macon, Ga. The group was made up of students, mothers, fathers, engineers and even an entomologist.

In Macon, a day to celebrate becoming an American

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
April 14, 2025
A crowd gathered in the Zelma Redding Amphitheater for the official opening March 18, 2025, of the Otis Redding Center for the Arts in Macon, Ga.

New arts center named for soul great Otis Redding is open for education and expression

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 20, 2025
Jeremy Robinson (center) and Aliyah Hill perform last checks on packets of Mana Nutrition emergency food supplements for children before packaging them in the nonprofit’s factory in Fitzgerald, Ga. “We save lives,” Robinson said of his part of the work that has saved millions of children globally.

Georgia factory making emergency food for children worldwide is back working for USAID

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 5, 2025
Mercer University sophomore Taylor Boyd mounts a piece of the Freedom Seekers exhibit at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon in 2025. The exhibit features so-called “runaway slave ads” researched by students like Boyd. “They had everyday problems just like us,” Boyd said. “Reading their stories and reading that they were running away to families or they had lovers — that really just exemplified the importance of why we need to showcase this.”

Tubman museum’s newspaper ad exhibition honors the humanity of enslaved people

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
February 24, 2025
Kennnesaw State University architecture students present their final designs for a mixed use development in Macon's Greenwood Bottom neighborhood to residents and community leaders.

For Kennesaw State students, the first step in revitalizing Macon’s Greenwood Bottom is listening

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
December 11, 2024
Angel Irving, second from right, talks with Atlanta landscape architect and planner Lauren Standish, right, during a community meeting Thursday about the proposed East Bank redevelopment project at the old Bibb Mill site. Irving said as the project goes forward, she wants assurances that on site jobs are open to local workers.

East Macon residents ask developers to keep an eye out for them in the East Bank Project

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
November 22, 2024
The old Hilton hotel was known more recently as the Ramada Crowne Plaza, as seen in 2012 from the intersection of Second Street and Walnut Street in Macon.

[Photo] New Year’s Eve hotel demolition creates downtown development opportunity

Liz Fabian, Civic Journalism Senior Fellow
November 20, 2024
A catastrophically damaged timber stand in Treutlen County is seen from Ben Gillis' truck.

Hurricane Helene knocked a massive hole in Georgia’s timber industry

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
November 18, 2024
Carrie Proffitt protests in 2023 across from the Georgia Governor's Mansion with photos of her son who took his own life in a Georgia Department of Corrections prison.

The federal Department of Justice: ‘deliberate indifference’ to violence in Georgia prisons

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
October 2, 2024
Pleasant Hill residents and an architectural rendering of an apartment block planned for the lot with the playground behind them after the announcement of Pleasant Hill Landing Sept. 19, 2024.

Pleasant Hill to get new affordable housing

Rent will be capped at $600 in the 64-apartment development
Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
September 20, 2024
The grave of Blanche Haywood. Until recent work by preservationists in the historically African American Oak Ridge Cemetery, the grave of the woman born in the 1840s was completely hidden by the understory.

Unerasing the history of Macon’s Oak Ridge African American cemetery

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
August 24, 2024
Volunteers rip out English ivy by hand in a patch of urban forest in Macon known to support the federally endangered fringed campion plant on July 18, 2024. The workday was part of a multi-agency effort to protect the plant only found in a few dozen sites in Georgia and Florida.

In Macon, volunteers fight escaped garden plants to save an endangered native

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
August 15, 2024
Jan Smith hugs members of her legal team after the final hearing before Georgia's Public Service Commission on the issue of whether or not a local railroad can use eminent domain to take rural land which has been in her husband's family since the 1920s.

Sparta residents and the railroad they oppose get a final hearing

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
August 8, 2024
Georgia secretary of state office technician Chris Bellew (left) runs a test on Bibb County elections systems while Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (right) talks to a reporter Tuesday, July 30, 2024.

Bibb County and others get a clean bill of voting machine health from the state

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
July 31, 2024
Kids at the Boys and Girls Club on Anthony Road in Macon get their second helpings of fresh fruit and vegetables through the Happy Helpings summer food program recently.

Hungry Georgia kids now have another way to find meals this summer

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
June 27, 2024
Sister Theresa Sullivan, right, speaks during a ceremony May 20, 2024, marking the near-completion of Macon's Central City Apartments.

New Macon apartments to offer affordability and medical respite for the unhoused

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
May 22, 2024
Students leave the Earth lodge, thought to be used historically as a council space, at the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park in Macon in 2022.

Oklahoma’s Muscogee (Creek) Nation prepares to co-manage Georgia’s first National Park

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
May 7, 2024
A new historical marker on Macon's Poplar Street describes the slave market on the site of the brick building in the left background of the image which at one time recently was a yoga studio.

‘A long time coming’: How Macon is preserving Black history in bronze and QR codes, one by one

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
April 23, 2024
Gloria Hammond by Berry Creek, at the back of her property in Monroe County. She said the creek has changed a lot in the decades since the Plant Scherer Ash Pond 1 was created. “I don't see my mussel shells that I used to see on the sand,” she said. “I don't hear the frogs at night down here.”

What’s legal for closing Georgia’s coal ash ponds might hinge on one word: Infiltration

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
April 15, 2024
A map shows the location of the cloud-connected surveillance cameras belonging to Bibb County, as seen in the control room of the Bibb County Sheriff's Office. When their owners agree to add their private cameras, those will show up as tiny red dots.

Bibb County law enforcement wants residents to share their doorbell cameras

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
April 1, 2024
People scatter hundreds of sets of unclaimed cremated human remains around a small garden at Macon's Rose Hill Cemetery during a short ceremony on Thursday, March 28, 2024.

Hundreds of cremated remains of unclaimed people scattered in Macon ceremony

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 29, 2024
Anitra Chandrasekar of Jacksonville, Fla., (left) poses for her mother, Meena, among the Yoshino cherry blossoms along Ingleside Drive in Macon.

In Macon, the city’s cherry blossom festival chases the calendar amid a changing climate

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 22, 2024
A small group of death penalty opponents gathered outside Georgia Diagnostic Prison in Jackson to protest the execution of Willie Pye on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.

Georgia ends its pandemic moratorium on executions by killing Willie Pye

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 21, 2024
Candidates for Bibb County sheriff, from left, Chris Patterson, Ron Rodgers, DeAndre Hall, Sheriff David Davis, Marshall Hughes and Chris Paul sit for a March 2024 forum during their runs for the office.

Candidates for Bibb County sheriff debate the roots of violent crime in Macon

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 12, 2024
U.S. Rep. Jefferson Long (left), the first Black congressman of Georgia, and pioneering educator of Black children Lucy Craft Laney (right) are depicted in a mural by artist Kevin Lewis in Macon's Pleasant Hill neighborhood which both at one time called home.

Why Supreme Court debate recalls prophetic words spoken by Maconite Jefferson Long in 1871

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
February 8, 2024
Nathan and Joyce Klaus embrace after the release of six endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers at Sprewell Bluff in Upson County in fall 2023 — the culmination of decades of work by conservationists.

In the hills of West Georgia, decades of care and fire sculpt a new home for endangered woodpeckers

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
January 5, 2024
Protesters were outside the Georgia Governor's Mansion on Oct. 3, 2023 to bring attention to violence and other concerns in Georgia's prisons. One protester carries a photo of Stephanie Widener, who died of sepsis in Georgia Department of Corrections custody.

Protesters outside governor’s mansion demand Kemp take action against prison violence

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
October 4, 2023
Georgia Academy for the Blind senior Daquan Brown with the 3d yearbook printed for him and other members of the Class of 2023 by Mercer University engineering students.

Mercer students continue tradition of creating 3D yearbooks for the blind

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
May 10, 2023
Heaven Upshaw-Peters, foreground, and the rest of the graduates in the Bibb County Teaching as a Profession program, during their Signing Day ceremony recently.

Program aimed at encouraging students to be teachers graduates its first class

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
May 5, 2023
Randy Bedingfield plays the piano during a November reception at the Daybreak Day Center, which offers an array of services to the unhoused in Macon. Daybreak is privately funded but a Georgia Senate bill would audit public funds spent on such services.

A Georgia Senate bill asks for audits of homeless services. Why?

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
March 8, 2023
Danielle Jones is the McKinney-Vento liaison for the Bibb County School District where she and a small staff work within the limits of the law to provide stability for homeless students.

Housing aid doesn’t always reach homeless youth. Here’s how educators aim to help

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
February 1, 2023
Macon-Bibb County will hold three virtual public hearings to discuss maintaining the current millage rate which will add an additional $2.6 million to the county budget.

Macon-Bibb County flies the Muscogee Nation flag above the city

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
January 23, 2023
Wesley Reimer feeds his son Marshall from a bottle in their Macon home. Reimer partially blames the current baby formula shortage on panicked shoppers stockpiling formula and on profiteers selling formula online.

[Photo] The national baby formula shortage means struggle for many Georgia families

Tanya Ott, Center for Collaborative Journalism
May 26, 2022
Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Timothy C. Ward, second from right, after the March meeting of the Board of Corrections in Forsyth.

[Photo] Federal investigators are asking the court to force transparency on Georgia prisons

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
April 8, 2022
Dozens of vans, trucks, cars and buses parked at Hawthorne and Third streets parked in a county-owned lot downtown have government-issued tags. The vehicles are not owned by the county or any agency of the county. They belong to a private nonprofit called the Macon-Bibb County Economic Opportunity Council Inc.

[Photo] Public money, private business: oversight limited at Macon-Bibb Economic Opportunity Council

Laura Corley, Civic Journalism Fellow
February 18, 2022
Tattnall Square Academy wrestler Grady Tisdale practices at Macon’s Rush Mixed Martial Arts gym. The only member of his high school wrestling team, Tisdale is one of the best wrestlers in Georgia at his weight class.

[Photo] A team of one: Tattnall’s only wrestler Grady Tisdale has his eye on a state title

Tanya Ott
February 14, 2022
Georgia Department of Corrections cadets and trainers before the 2010 ribbon cutting for the department's training facility and offices in Forsyth. A labor strike of the incarcerated would come about month later. GDC lost over 2,000 correctional officers in the following year.

Kareemah Hanifa during her September 2021 testimony to a committee of Georgia legislators concerned with violence in the state's prisons. Hanifa began serving a life sentence when she was a teenager.

[Photo] Why the investigation into Georgia prisons matters

Debbie Blankenship, Center for Collaborative Journalism
November 19, 2021
Nerissa Wright's son, Dontavis Mintz, died for reasons she still doesn't know in Ware State Prison near Waycross. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Georgia Department of Corrections largely because of such deaths.

A mother’s son died in Georgia prison. The Department of Justice wonders if understaffing is why

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
November 19, 2021
The trash was placed at the curb on Laura Ann Place off of Forest Hill Road earlier this month.

What’s up with the Landfill and my trash?

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
June 29, 2021
Family and neighbors of Quinterious Hillman and Jerod Lester watch as Bibb County Sheriff's Deputies investigate the scene of Hillman and Lester's killing in May.

Looking for solutions amid the pandemic homicide spike

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
June 10, 2021
Hiring more tutors to offer more individual instruction are among the ideas provided by school system staff.

Bibb County Schools Asks Parents For Ideas For Spending $100 Million

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcast
April 30, 2021
As Georgia Mass Vaccination Sites Close, Grassroots Efforts Try To Fill In The Gaps

As Georgia Mass Vaccination Sites Close, Grassroots Efforts Try To Fill In The Gaps

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
April 28, 2021
Calvin Jackson picks up trash in the yard of one of two vacant houses in ill repair in the cul de sac on his street in the Kings Park neighborhood of Macon recently. Jackson says picking up trash this way is a habit he's had for a few years. "They tell me it's not my job," he said. "I do it anyway."

[Photo] Addressing Blight in Macon

Debbie Blankenship, Center for Collaborative Journalism
April 20, 2021
A study is underway to determine whether a 50-mile stretch of the Ocmulgee River and adjacent land should be added to the National Park Service.

[Photo] Should expanded Ocmulgee Mounds national park extend to Hawkinsville?

Liz Fabian, Civic Reporting Senior Fellow
February 8, 2021
Ahead Of The Super Bowl, A Pandemic Driven Shortage Of Chicken Wings

Ahead Of The Super Bowl, A Pandemic Driven Shortage Of Chicken Wings

Grant Blankenship, Reporter/GPB
February 4, 2021
Volunteers, mostly from the Single Moms Connect support group, prepare grocery boxes during one of the group's twice monthly food disbursals in Houston County.

Cost of COVID: Food Bank Labor Dries Up

Grant Blankenship, Reporter, GPB
November 22, 2020
Trump Supporters at 2018 rally in Macon.

Headed To Trump’s Macon Rally? Know The COVID-19 Risk

Grant Blankenship, GPB Reporter
October 15, 2020
Bibb County High School students earning credits, and preparing high end restaurant food through the district's culinary program at Hutchings Career Academy.

[Video] Keeping The Kitchen Open, To Graduate

Grant Blankenship, GPB News Reporter
October 5, 2020

Virtual School, The Struggle To Go Online

Grant Blankenship, GPB News Reporter
September 15, 2020
Cars snaked around St. Paul AME Church in Macon during a four hour coronavirus testing pop up Wednesday.

Macon Coronavirus Infections Doubled In Last 2 Weeks

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
July 8, 2020
Technicians at the Hancock County Health Department wait to perform a coronavirus test in May. The virus spread in Hancock has been labeled "severe."

[Video] Coronavirus cases on the rise in young adults

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
June 30, 2020
Mercer University in Macon conducted pop up coronavirus testing at a homeless day center after other labs turned people away for not having a car for "drive up" tests.

[Video] Coronavirus Tests For The Homeless When ‘Drive Up’ Isn’t An Option

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
June 5, 2020
Testing performed by a private lab in a church parking lot in Macon. Testers usually recommend breathing through the mouth as the swab goes to the back of the nasal cavity.

How To Get A Coronavirus Test In Georgia

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
May 13, 2020
New pedestrian crosswalks at Bass Road and Interstate 75 are part of state safety enhancements but there are no sidewalks on that busy thoroughfare.

[Photo] Bass Road crosswalks to nowhere spark safety planning discussion

Liz Fabian, Civic Reporting Senior Fellow
January 24, 2020
Grant Wmaz

[Photo] When and why are teens committing crimes?

Chelsea Beimfohr, 13WMAZ Staff
September 17, 2019
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce Congressional Luncheon at the Macon Marriott City Center on Tuesday, August 21, 2018.

Why Shouldn’t Kemp Recuse Himself? Ask Someone Who Had His Job

Grant Blankenship, GPB Macon
August 23, 2018
Chiquita Dinkins teaches a unit on photosynthesis to students at the old Northeast High School in Macon in 2018.

Former students, now teachers, taking the lead in helping turn around this school

Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting
October 20, 2017
integration04

[Photo] “Where do the white kids go to school in Macon?”

Ashley P. Murray, Special to The Telegraph
April 5, 2017

[Video] Journey to school integration was painful, prolonged process

Andrea Honaker, Telegraph staff writer
March 31, 2017
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