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Albany Civil Rights Movement
Museum (912) 432-1698 432-2150 fax |
| The Virtual Museum | Mission | Brief History of the Movement | The Museum in the Schools | Tourist Information | Background to the Movement | Questions to Consider | Photos | Music | Oral History | Movement Bibliography | Links to Other Sites |
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A Celebration of
Courage and
Freedom
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Former Mount Zion Baptist Church, Site of Civil Rights Mass
Meetings in the Early 1960's Located at 326 Whitney Street, Albany GA |
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Mission |
The Honorable John Lewis Born the son of sharecroppers in 1940, John Lewis grew up on his family's farm and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama. For more than three decades, he has been in the vaguard of progressive social movements and the human rights struggles in the United States. As a student, John Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1961, Lewis volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, organized to challenge segregation at Interstate bus terminals across the South. He risked his life and was beaten severely by mobs for his participation. From 1963 to 1966, Lewis served as Chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped form. At the age of 23, he was one of the planners and a keynote speaker at the historic "March on Washington." In 1965, Lewis led one of the most dramatic nonviolent protests of the Movement. Along with fellow activist Hosea Williams, he hed 525 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Alabam State Troopers attacked the marchers in a confrontation that became known as "Bloody Sunday." In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council and served until 1986 when he was elected to Congress. In June 1998 he authored Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, with writer Michael D'Orso. He has been described as "one of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement ever produced." |
| Background to the
Movement The protests organized by the Albany Civil Rights Movement were an important chapter not only in the history of Albany but also in the national civil rights movement. News of the protests in Albany inspired similar protests in other southwest Georgia communities, including Americus, Lee County, Terrell County, Moultrie, Cordele, Thomasville, and Baker County. They also helped to inspire movements in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana, and Florida. At the time the movement started in the late 1950s, it was not at all clear that such defiance would eventually produce positive change. In fact, the protests revealed how deeply ingrained segregation was. It was one thing to force authorities to remove the "White Only" signs on public bathrooms and bus seats. It was quite another to level the playing field in employment, education, politics, and racial attitudes. Those struggles continue even today. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was not the first attempt to fight racism and segregation. There were protests and sometimes riots in both southern and northern communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. |
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Before the Civil War, slaves rebelled individually and in groups almost from the time the first slaves were captured and brought to America. Most of these rebellions were put down by slaveowners using guns and whips and jail cells. Many of the rebels were killed on the spot or hanged in public. Slaveowners kept bloodhounds to track down slaves who tried to escape. Their local and state government representatives passed laws that strictly forbade any activity directed against the system of slavery. Local police and slave patrollers enforced these laws. Just as the slaveowners used police to maintain slavery before the Civil War, segregationists used police to maintain segregation and racism after the Civil War. Many of the protests during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s were directed at the police because of their role in enforcing segregation. The story of the Movement in Albany and hundreds of other communities in the South is a story of "ordinary people in extraordinary times." Although the history books written about the Movement and the newspaper stories that appeared at the time describe what Movement leaders did, these leaders were successful only because they were supported by hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose names are never mentioned. This is true of any social or political movement--the struggle against British rule in India led by Mohandas Gandhi, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and many others. |
Tourist InformationThe Museum is located just south of downtown Albany, in the Freedom District, a historic district that extends from the banks of the Flint River to the Museum and includes Thronateeska Heritage Center (housed in the old train terminal). A map of our location will be available here soon, to guide out-of-town guests.
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A major objective of the Museum is to become an educational resource for schools and colleges in southwest Georgia and elsewhere. We are working with the Dougherty County School System and Albany State University (a historically black unit of the University System of Georgia) to design educational programs around the Museum's resources.
This site will eventually become a "virtual Museum." Using the new technologies of the information age, the Museum will be able to travel anywhere on the Internet. Many of the resources of the Museum--text, graphics, photographs, copies of historical documents (clippings, flyers, etc.), and audio and video recordings--will be a click away.
The Museum puts emphasis on the role of "ordinary" people. The movement was an assertion of the power that "ordinary" people could wield and of their ability to transcend and defy the customs of the time, even so strong a tradition as Jim Crow. Leaders are powerless without followers, but a people united can achieve miracles.
Here are some of the questions to consider as you "tour" this virtual Museum:
What was it like to be an African-American in the South before the Civil Rights Movement?
What is it like now?
Why did people march and protest in the 1960s?
What was it like to be part of a civil rights protest in the 1960s?
What were mass meetings, and what happened at these meetings?
Would a protest today be any different from a protest in the 1960s?
Why did most southern white political and community leaders support segregation in the 1960s? How did they explain their opposition to protesters?
How did segregation and racism benefit whites in the South?
Did whites in the South lose anything by living in a segregated community?
We know that African Americans often paid a high price for protesting in the 1960s. Were whites able to protest in the South before the Civil Rights Movement?
What have we as Americans gained through the changes brought about by the Civil Rights Movement?
How did the media influence the outcome of the movement?
What was the role of the federal government in the civil rights movement?
How did public opinion outside the South influence the outcome of the movement?
The Virtual Museum is a product of the new technology, which provides an opportunity to create a multimedia learning experience, a collage through which the user can navigate simply by clicking on a choice from a menu as one would do on an Internet site. The user can skip from text to audio/video, contemporary to historic, instructional items to questions and answers.
The Virtual Museum will offer links to information on the context of the Albany and southwest Georgia civil rights movement. This will allow the 1960s to be used as a starting point for exploration of local or national events, contemporary or even more distant historical material.
One of the most important features in the Museum's holdings is a collection of photographs by photographer-journalists who documented many of the confrontations and the daily life which characterized the 1960s civil rights movement. Many will be available for downloading from this site in addition to being displayed in the Museum. The most important group of photographs is the Danny Lyon collection. Lyon, a northern white civil rights worker, was the first official photographer of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His book, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 1992), contains a number of his civil rights movement photographs.
Music played a key role in uniting people during tense moments of the movement, particularly in the South. Some of the most popular songs were actually adaptations of traditional hymns sung in African American churches. Lyrics were sometimes composed on the spot during demonstrations, identifying issues and people at whom the demonstrations were directed. Strong and talented singers emerged in each community, usually from members of local church choirs.
The Museum is collecting the oral histories of people who participated in the movement locally. These histories convey the feeling of being involved in a great social movement which helped to alter the course of American history, as no scholarly or journalistic history can. These histories will be available, in excerpted form, from this Web site and will be available unabridged at the Museum.
To suggest a link for this page, contact us by e-mail at mtzion@surfsouth.com, or fax/voice at (912) 432-1698, or at P.O. Box 6036, Albany GA 31706. Webmaster: John Perdew (mtzion@surfsouth.com)
Last modified 10/21/00
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