Category:Famous People from Atlanta
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, the second of three children of the Reverend Michael King Sr., and the church he grew up around, Ebenezer Baptist, is the one Raphael Warnock has led as senior pastor since 2005 while sitting in the United States Senate. The category collects biographical entries on people connected to Atlanta by birth or by working life. Read against the other city rosters on this wiki, its distinguishing feature is how often the city is the destination rather than the origin: a large share of the membership was born somewhere else and became identified with Atlanta as adults.
Background
Atlanta is the capital of Georgia and the commercial center of the American Southeast. It is a corporate headquarters city, home to Home Depot and Intercontinental Exchange among others, and a media city, first through the cable business Ted Turner built and more recently through film and television production. The historically Black colleges of the city recur throughout the education sections of members below: Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University. Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University account for much of the rest.
The arrival pattern is worth stating plainly, because it governs how the roster should be read. Raphael Warnock was born in Savannah. Bernie Marcus was born in Newark, New Jersey, and died in Atlanta. Ted Turner was born in Cincinnati. Nikema Williams was born in Columbus, Georgia. Shereé Whitfield was born and raised in Cleveland and established herself in the Atlanta metropolitan area afterwards; Quad Webb was born and raised in Memphis and did the same. Membership here rests on where a public life happened at least as often as on a birth certificate.
Politics, the pulpit and the civil rights inheritance
The elected membership is recent, concentrated and mostly Democratic. Raphael Warnock took his undergraduate degree at Morehouse College and became the first African American United States senator from Georgia while remaining at Ebenezer Baptist. Jon Ossoff was born in the city on February 16, 1987. Stacey Abrams took her undergraduate degree at Spelman College and has lived in Atlanta for most of her adult life. Nikema Williams represents the fifth congressional district, which covers most of the city and which John Lewis held for more than three decades.
City Hall runs across administrations and parties. Keisha Lance Bottoms was born in Atlanta and served as its 60th mayor before a 2026 gubernatorial run; Andre Dickens, born in the city in 1974, came through Georgia Tech and Georgia State to serve as the 61st. On the Republican side, Johnny Isakson was born and died in Atlanta after a Senate career and a chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee; Geoff Duncan, born in the city in 1975 and educated at Georgia Tech, served as the 12th lieutenant governor of Georgia and later switched parties; Brian Jack, born in Atlanta in 1988, was White House Political Director before entering the House from Georgia's third district. Hamilton Jordan, the strategist behind Jimmy Carter's national campaign, died in the city.
Two Bravo franchises and the television roster
An unusually large share of this membership reaches the public through two Bravo series filmed in the city, and the concentration is heavy enough that it defines the category as much as the politics does. The Real Housewives of Atlanta premiered in October 2008 as the third installment of the franchise; its original cast is represented here by DeShawn Snow, Shereé Whitfield and Kim Zolciak-Biermann, who was raised in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Later cast and recurring figures include Porsha Williams, born in Atlanta in 1981, Marlo Hampton, Eva Marcille, who won the third cycle of America's Next Top Model and attended Clark Atlanta University, Monyetta Shaw-Carter, Shamea Morton Mwangi, Shamari DeVoe, lead singer of Blaque and a native of Detroit, Brit Eady and Tanya Sam, an oncology nurse who also runs a book club.
Married to Medicine premiered on March 24, 2013 and follows women connected to the city's medical community, several of whom practice medicine rather than only appearing on television. Dr. Jackie Walters is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist in the metropolitan area, Dr. Simone Whitmore is a physician, and Dr. Heavenly Kimes is a dentist who has also stood for office. Quad Webb, Toya Bush-Harris, Lisa Nicole Cloud, Lateasha Lunceford and Kelli Ferrell appear alongside them. Erika Girardi was born in Atlanta but belongs to the Beverly Hills series rather than the Atlanta one.
Business, music and the founders
The commercial membership is built on companies headquartered in the city. Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot and later founded and funded the Georgia Aquarium. Jeffrey Sprecher built Intercontinental Exchange out of the Buckhead neighborhood and used it to acquire the New York Stock Exchange, a reversal of the usual direction of financial gravity, and still lives in Buckhead. Ted Turner founded CNN and the Turner Broadcasting System and put Braves games on national television. Pinky Cole founded the Slutty Vegan restaurant chain here. Joe Gebbia, born in Atlanta on August 21, 1981, went to the Rhode Island School of Design and co-founded Airbnb.
Childish Gambino was born in the city in 1983 and later co-created and starred in the television series Atlanta. A newer technology cohort runs through Georgia Tech: Antony Samuel, an electrical engineer who founded Artifact and is based in the city, Ansh Gupta, a Georgia Tech computer science graduate and co-founder of Haleum, and Elton Lossner, who is from Atlanta and co-founded Hazel after Harvard.
See also
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