National Center's Mission and Vision
Mission
The Mission of the Alabama State University Center for the study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture is two-fold: to serve as a clearinghouse for information concerning Montgomery, Alabama's pivotal role in the shaping and development of modern civil rights movement, and to preserver and disseminate information reflective of socioeconomic conditions, political culture, and history of African-Americans in Montgomery. The center will augment classroom instruction and curriculum through its living museum, scholarly seminars, publications, and appearances of its personnel at public forums around Montgomery and elsewhere. The facility will be a place for scholars, students, lay historians, and all people interested in studying the modern civilrights movement and Montgomery's place in it.
Vision
The Alabama State University Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture will be a research institute and repository in Montgomery, Alabama, for the collection of civil rights and African-American cultural documents, artifacts, and other memorabilia. Such a collection will encompass and allow for the study of the interdisciplinary, diverse, and disparate character of civil rights and African-American culture. Although this undertaking will naturally encompass and extend to other resources throughout the state, the Center's focus will be on Montgomery and its unique role in American history as the cradle of both the Confederacy and the modern civil rights movement. Inclusive in this mission will be an effort to detail lives of African-Americans in Montgomery, their socio-economic and political culture, and their history. As a repository, the Center will network with the lay community to gather and record the stories of importance to African-American Culture, including those mundane features of daily life that have given African-American in Alabama the stamina to endure and overcome racism, poverty, and illiteracy, as well as those features that have provided them the strength, brilliance, and self-esteem to nurture a rich cultural heritage. To that end, the Center will conserve the rich resources of the community by gathering oral histories, collecting privately held multimedia, and documenting the critical contributions of information and resources supplied by African-Americans and organizations such as churches, benevolent societies, federated clubs, civic organizations, fraternal orders, and business. These collections will be cataloged and made available to the public at large. It will link with other research centers to connect disparate histories of significance for a comprehensive study of the civil rights movement and African-American culture.
In accordance with Alabama State University's Mission, the Center will foster research, teaching and learning as an outgrowth of the collections housed in the Center and in the community, thereby stimulating an understanding of and appreciation for civil rights and African-American culture and the central place of that culture in the American South. Thus, the Center will provide support to the various programs in the university by strengthening those humanities courses that study the African-American experience in general and the modern civil rights movement in particular. The learning center and archives proposed at the university will encourage scholarship through various programs including internships, fellowships, seminars, exhibitions, lectures, and publications. It will be a unique effort in Montgomery, Alabama, to offer a facility for both repository and research that will study, analyze, interpret, publish, and preserve the illustrious history and culture of Montgomery's African-American citizenry.