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. 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. A major objective of the Museum is to become an educational resource for schools and colleges in southwest Georgia and elsewhere. Using the new technologies of the information age, the Museum will be able to travel anywhere on the Internet.
Leaders are powerless without followers, but a people united can achieve miracles.
We know that African Americans often paid a high price for protesting in the 1960s. 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 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. Photographs 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.