Changes

Lee W. Formwalt was a professor of history at Albany (GA) State University for 22 years (1977-1999) and served his last 2 years there as Dean of the Graduate School. Founder and editor of The Journal of Southwest Georgia History, he has written numerous scholarly articles and essays, and a book on southwest Georgia history, focusing largely on the African American experience. From 1999 to 2009, he was executive director of the Organization of American Historians, the world’s largest professional association and learned society devoted to the study of United States history. In 2009, he returned to Albany, GA, to become executive director of the Albany Civil Rights Institute. He retired in 2011 and lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he is currently working on a memoir and a collection of his essays and articles on southwest Georgia history.

Students were the first to be arrested for trying to integrate the Trailways Bus Station in November 1961. When SNCC Freedom Riders were arrested in December, mass protests by students and adults resulted in over 750 arrests, including that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Another 750 arrests were made in the next 18 months for a total of 1500 in 20 months. King’s involvement in Albany accelerated the national press coverage the movement began to experience.

When King left Albany in the waning days of summer 1962 after having been jailed three times, the city was as segregated as it ever had been. King admitted that he had failed in Albany, but that he learned some important lessons there that he applied in Birmingham in 1963. In many accounts of the civil rights movement, the victories in Montgomery (1955-1956), Birmingham (1963), and the March from Selma to Montgomery (1965) get most of the attention and Albany is noted as the place where King made mistakes and failed. The problem with this perspective is that it is King-centric, implying that Albany was significant only when King was involved. It sees Albany as a part of the national civil rights movement sandwiched between the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the Birmingham protests and March on Washington of 1963 and fails to take it on its own terms as a local movement.

This book was written for a broad general audience, initially for visitors to the Albany Civil Rights Institute, who wanted to take away with them a history of the movement that they just experienced in the ACRI permanent exhibit. The Georgia Humanities Council recognized that Looking Back, Moving Forward was more than just a souvenir book—that it was an important contribution to civil rights scholarship. The Council began promoting the book, became copublisher with ACRI, and Council President Jamil Zainaldin wrote the foreword. Considering the broad general audience we made the decision to include many illustrations and no footnotes. At the end of the book is a list of more than two dozen books and articles for further reading, all of which I used in writing the book. Because this is the first book devoted solely to the Albany Movement and southwest Georgia freedom struggle from the time of white settlement to the present, I realized that some of my scholarly colleagues might also be interested in this work. So I kept a footnoted version of the book and I am currently exploring ways to make the documented manuscript available online.

Books are currently on sale at the Albany Civil Rights Institute, 326 Whitney Ave., Albany, GA 31701 and at the Georgia Humanities Council, 50 Hurt Plaza, S.E., Suite 595, Atlanta, GA 30303. The easiest way to order the book is to send a check for $22 (includes postage and handling) to ACRI, P.O. Box 6036, Albany, GA 31706-6036. The entire cost of publishing the book was raised from four sponsors, so all proceeds from sales go directly to ACRI to help the Institute continue to tell the story of the southwest Georgia freedom struggle.