A Movement Memory

Rep. Joseph C. Mitchell, of the Alabama State Legislature (D., 103rd District), spent his childhood years in Albany, Georgia, during the 1950s and early 1960s. His family relocated to  Mobile, Alabama, when  he entered high school.

His mother, Julia Craig Mitchell, and his father, J. Christopher Mitchell, a science teacher and coach at Albany State University, opened their home as a safe house for activists. Mitchell participated in the church-based mass meetings and rallies that the Albany Movement pioneered as a strategy for civil dissent. Click here to read his account of how Albany’s black community responded to the racist treatment they faced.

Special Thanks To:

Professor Barbara McCaskill
(Associate Professor of English and Co-Director, Civil Rights Digital Library)

Kendra Abercrombie
(B.S. Political Science/ African American Studies)

Kamille Bostick
(M.A. English)

J. D. Brandon
(B.A. International Affairs/History/English)

Lauren Chambers
(PhD English)

Christina L. Davis
(PhD History)

Aggie Ebrahimi
(M.A. English/PhD Creative Writing)

Wendy Harris
(PhD Education)

Mary Boyce Hicks
(B.A. Honors History/Journalism)

Anthony Omerikwa
(PhD Education)

Ebony O'Neal
(B.S. Computer Science, Spelman College)

Courtney Thomas
(B.A. Honors English/  Pre-Law)

Stacie L. Walker
(B.A. English/English Education)

Delila Wilburn
(B.A. English)

And the undergraduates of ENGL 2400 (Spring 2007), AFAM/ENGL 3230 (Spring 2007), and ENGL 4860 (Fall 2007) at The University of Georgia.

Click on an image above to view a description of the image and its location in the WSB-TV clips

Welcome

During the Civil Rights Movement, ordinary men and women challenged the nation to apply its founding values of justice, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all citizens, regardless of skin color.  From throughout the South women, men, and children of different social classes, educational levels, races, and religions united in a national effort to practice the principles of democracy, nonviolence, and civic action.

This web site spotlights their activities out of nine cities and towns in Georgia, from the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, to the anti-poverty and      anti-war campaigns of the early 1970s.  Browse these pages to see video from the era, shot by photographers at WSB-TV/Channel 2 News (Atlanta) and WALB-TV/Channel 10 News  (Albany).  Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, this video has been restored and preserved online by the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative.  The University of Georgia permanently houses the news footage in its Walter J. Brown Media Archives.

We invite you to click on a location to your left to learn about Georgia’s Civil Rights Movement stories.  We encourage you to consider the impact of the words and deeds that unfold before you on screen, and to make connections to contemporary issues of human rights, racial equality, citizenship, and social justice.  Where in the world would the tactics of nonviolence and court-initiated change still prove effective?  What similar issues does your community face?  Who are today’s revolutionary “marchers to freedom-land”?  In education, business, law, entertainment, and the arts, who understands, in the words of Georgia-born writer Alice Walker, that if the Movement “gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever”?*

*From “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?”  In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 128.

Freedom on Film List of Stories (click here)