John A. Griffin Progress Report of Georgia Tech's Part in the War

John A. Griffin (1912-1997), an educator, labor arbitrator, and civil rights activist, served on the faculty at Georgia Tech during the late 1930s and early 1940s. From 1944 to 1959, he worked at Emory University as a special assistant to the President, Associate Professor of Sociology, and founder of the Evening at Emory continuing education program.

John Ansley Griffin was born in Monroe, Georgia, on July 3, 1912 to parents William Hull Griffin and Belle B. Griffin. He was educated at Emory University, receiving undergraduate and master's degrees there. He received his doctoral degree in sociology and agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin. After a brief period at Georgia Tech, Griffin began a 15-year career at Emory, where he worked with the Ford Foundation on a study of segregated Southern schools, leading to the publication of journalist Harry Ashmore's The Negro and the Schools. This publication is said to have been influential in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Griffin helped found the Southern Regional Council in 1944, an organization dedicated to bringing blacks and whites together. He also wrote on the subject of education in the South in the 1955 Public Education in the South Today and Tomorrow.

Throughout his life, Griffin was active in the civil rights movement, serving for part of the decades of the 1950s and 1960s as Associate Director for Conciliation with the United States Community Relations Service. He also held the position of Executive Director of the Southern Education Foundation from 1965 to 1978.

Griffin was married twice. He and his first wife, Wallace Lillard Lyons (d. 1960), had four children. In 1968, he married the former Anne Ryland Ricks (1926-2000). Griffin died in Atlanta on January 25, 1997.