The Coffee County Memory Project and the Coffee County Historical Society announce a virtual museum exhibition – emergingVOICES of Coffee County, 50th Anniversary. You can find it on this website: https://www.emergingvoicesofcoffeecounty50thanniversary.com/ .
This exhibit celebrates the 50th anniversary of the integration of the schools of Coffee County, Georgia. Since 2016 scores of teachers, administrators, staff, parents, and students from all the county’s schools offered their stories of the events of 50 years ago. Their voices express diverse points of view reflecting contrasting accounts of the same incidents. While hearing these emergingVOICES tell their stories, exhibit participants gain a new understanding of others and the events that defined this transformation period. This informative exhibition is designed to facilitate discussion of the material and these experiences in an educational setting. This first exhibition is dedicated to those who generously and often courageously recorded their memories of this period of intense change.
This is the first in a series of exhibitions based on the interviews this project has collected. What is next? The Georgia Humanities has offered our team the opportunity to create a website featuring a tour of historic sites of Coffee County. Each location will be paired with firsthand accounts of historical events as told by those experiencing these formative times. Project organizers hope to launch the first portion of our tour, Downtown Douglas, before the end of the year!
This project has received support from a number of private donors as well as Georgia Tech’s Serve, Learn, Sustain Department and Georgia Tech’s Digital Media Lab. This virtual museum installation has been developed with a grant from Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, through funding from the Georgia General Assembly.
Local contacts for emergingVoicesof Coffee County, 50th Anniversary include Carol Ray Morgan, Jim Cottingham, and members of the Coffee County GA Historical Society.