Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Albany Technical College of Albany, Georgia, on the occasion of its 65th anniversary. Mr. Speaker, in 1961 this institution opened its doors as the Monroe Area…
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Albany Technical College of Albany, Georgia, on the occasion of its 65th anniversary.
Mr. Speaker, in 1961 this institution opened its doors as the Monroe Area Vocational Technical School with 175 students. One hundred seventy-five. In a segregated South Georgia, in a year when very few people in authority believed that the children of sharecroppers and mill hands and domestic workers needed anything more than a strong back, somebody in Albany, Georgia, decided otherwise.
The Albany Area Vocational-Technical School followed shortly after, and in 1972 the two schools were joined together at the campus the college occupies today. In July of 1988, with the formation of what is now the Technical College System of Georgia, the school became Albany Technical Institute and was charged with serving a seven-county region--Baker, Calhoun, Clay, Dougherty, Lee, Randolph, and Terrell-- some of the most rural and most economically challenged counties in the United States of America. And on July 6, 2000, having met the standard set by the General Assembly in House Bill 1187 to award the associate degree, Albany Technical Institute became Albany Technical College.
Mr. Speaker, 65 years is a long time to keep a promise. It has been kept by every person who ever led this institution by President Howard Water, by President Wayne Israel, by President Nathaniel Cross, by President Alvin Anderson, by President Dr. Anthony O. Parker, and today by Dr. Emmett L. Griswold--and by every instructor who ever stood in a shop with a clipboard and refused to let a student quit.
Mr. Speaker, you cannot tell the story of this college without telling the story of two men.
Dr. Anthony O. Parker became the fifth president of Albany Technical College in 1995, arriving in a community still digging itself out from the great flood of 1994, and he led the rebuilding. He stayed for 27 years--the longest-serving president in the history of the college and the longest-serving president in the entire Technical College System of Georgia. He built the enrollment. He built the buildings. He built partnerships with the Marine Corps Logistics Base and with industry across this region. He was among the first technical college presidents in Georgia to raise a million dollars in private money for his campus. And he never stopped fighting for adult learners--for the grown man and the grown woman who walked in for a GED and walked out with a career.
Mr. Speaker, in November of 2011, I stood on that campus as Albany Tech dedicated its new library and media center in Dr. Parker's honor. I read a tribute to him into this very Record that day, and I presented him a flag that had flown over this Capitol in his name. He told us then why that building meant what it meant to him: his mother had been a librarian, and as a boy he was made to stop at the county library and study on his way home before he was ever allowed to go outside and play. He said that at the time he did not appreciate it. He said that he had come to appreciate it very much.
Mr. Speaker, on the morning of June 6, 2022, Dr. Anthony Parker passed away. He was 69 years old. He did not retire. He did not slow down. He had plans on the books for the next 5 years. He simply did not come to work one morning, and Southwest Georgia has not stopped missing him since.
Here, Mr. Speaker, is the part of this story that I want the House to hear.
In 2004, a man named Emmett Griswold walked through the front door of Albany Technical College to teach criminal justice. He had come out of law enforcement and corrections--a probation and parole officer for the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice, a deputy warden for the Georgia Department of Corrections--a man whose working life had been spent among people the world had already given up on. He was a native of Milledgeville who had made Albany his home.
He held his bachelor's and master's degrees from Albany State University, and he would go on to earn his doctorate from Valdosta State.
Dr. Parker took him under his wing. And Dr. Griswold rose--department chairman, dean of academic affairs, vice president for academic affairs, executive vice president--every rung of it, at the same institution, for 18 years.
When the college lost its president without warning, Albany Tech did not have to look outside for somebody to carry it. He was already there. On November 1, 2022, Dr. Emmett L. Griswold became the sixth president of Albany Technical College, standing on the foundation laid by his mentor and his friend.
Mr. Speaker, that is what 65 years of an institution actually looks like. Not a building. Not a seal. A man who taught, mentored, and believed in another man--who then took up the same work and kept the doors open for the next one.
Those doors, Mr. Speaker, have never asked a single student what their father did for a living. They have opened for the single mother working nights. For the man laid off at 45 who had to start over. For the young person nobody expected anything from, who is today a lineman, a nurse, a welder, a diesel technician, a logistics specialist--who owns a home, pays taxes, and raises children who will never know what it was to go without.
That is the harvest of 65 years in Southwest Georgia.
Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Albany Technical College on sixty-fiye years of service, in commending President Emmett L. Griswold, his faculty, his staff, and his Board of Directors, in honoring the memory of Dr. Anthony O. Parker and all who led before him, and in wishing this great institution many more years of transforming lives across Southwest Georgia.
