Jesse Hill Jr., born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1927, was an active civilian, civil rights leader, and dedicated member of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. Hill got involved with the company when he moved to Atlanta in his early twenties, and in his first two decades there, he became vice president and chief actuary. In 1973, he became the first president to not be related to the Herndons, and the company saw tremendous growth under his leadership. Atlanta Life’s revenue and value exceeded all previous levels during his twenty years as president. Hill was very involved with the community and used his position as a prominent business leader to promote causes he believed in. He volunteered for the Urban League and the NAACP, was instrumental in the integration of the University of Georgia, and organized voter registration drives that registered over fifty thousand black voters in Atlanta. He was the first African American on the Georgia Board of Regents, chairman of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and a founding director of MARTA. He served on the board of directors for eight major corporations including Delta and SunTrust. A year following his retirement from the Life Insurance Company in 1995, Jesse Hill Jr. helped bring the Olympic Games to Atlanta. He died in 2012 at the age of eighty-six after a life devoted to the betterment of his community.