Athens, Ga. – A new website examining the civil rights movement in Georgia has been launched. “Look Forward: A Digital Exhibition on Civil Rights and the Pulitzer Prize in Georgia,” a grant project produced by a team from the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, has unveiled LookForwardGA.org.
The project documents Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and literature from Georgia that promoted civil rights. The project was created in partnership with Georgia Humanities and was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfire Initiatives, a joint venture with the Federation of State Humanities Councils, in recognition of Pulitzer’s centennial celebration.
Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Hank Klibanoff will speak at the official launch of the exhibition on Jan. 13 at 11:15 a.m. in Studio 100 at the Grady College. Klibanoff, a contributor to Look Forward Georgia, will speak about “The Past is Never Dead: Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases and Why They Matter.” The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will follow.
Over the past 100 years, about half of the Pulitzer winners with ties to Georgia won for work that specifically promoted civil rights, making it a natural focus of the project.
“We believed civil rights was the most important focus and the most important connection between journalism, in particular, and the Pulitzer project and the state,” said Janice Hume, the Carolyn McKenzie and Don E. Carter Chair for Excellence in Journalism at Grady College and general editor of the Look Forward project. “We had this idea for a digital exhibition that would be a permanent exhibition for students and for scholars and that was the genesis of the project.”
LookFowardGA.org includes a multimedia collection of oral histories, photographs, videos and information about the civil rights movement in Georgia, all of which are tied to Pulitzer Prize-winning work. The website features a timeline, visual artifacts and a map of Georgia connecting events together geographically.
The project curator was Jason Lee Guthrie, a Grady College Ph.D. student who conducted most of the interviews, pulled together all the material and designed the website.
Video content was gathered from the WSB-TV collection in the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and the Peabody Awards Collection. Archival holdings at the University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries and Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library were also featured in the project.
Featured interviews with Pulitzer Prize winners include Klibanoff, who co-wrote “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation”; Cynthia Tucker, who won a Pulitzer in 2007 for commentary; and Mike Luckovich, who won Pulitzer Prizes in 1995 and 2006 for his editorial cartoons in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Events, like the publication of “Gone with the Wind,” and organizations, like The Columbus Enquirer-Sun, are also presented through the Look Forward website.
