Latest news, weather and high school sports for Albany and Southwest Georgia

ALBANY, GA --
An Albany State University Summer Bridge program is aiming to teach local high school students about the Albany Movement.

“We thought that in addition to teaching them humanities courses, literature and writing that we would incorporate that aspect of it, the civil rights movement here in Albany so that they could become intimately aware of what happened and why is happened and the value of that,” says Dr. James Hill with ASU’s Department of English, Modern Languages and Mass Communication.

He says while the Albany Civil Rights Institute is available for the youth to visit, he say many don’t. It’s why, Hill says, they want to introduce the Albany Movement and local history to high school students.

“This is one way that we can acquaint them not only with the oral history but also the living history of the Civil Rights movement,” says Hill.

The summer bridge program recently received nearly $100,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), but Hill says they need approximately double that to do what they hope to achieve with the program.

Through an application process, ASU will select 25 students from Dougherty and surrounding counties to participate.

“We're selecting ‘c’ students. We want to make sure that we select student who are perhaps at risk for not succeeding academically,” says Hill.

The six-week NEH program will begin in June of 2012. The student participants will have the opportunity to improve their communication and academic skills in the context of the humanities structure: literature, film, music, art, and local history. Hill says the application process will be announced publicly at a later date.

For more information on the ASU Summer Bridge Program, contact Dr. Marva Banks at (229) 430-4698.