Career teacher and Toccoa's first black city commissioner L.J. Harrison knows it's been a long battle for blacks to receive recognition for their contributions.
While Harrison says progress has been made toward that end, he said more work remains to be done.
"It's been a struggle to get people to honor and respect what black people have done," Harrison said in a telephone interview.
February is Black History Month, an observance that began in the early 20th Century as a week-long tribute in February that was founded by Carter G. Woodson.
The week was expanded in 1970 to encompass the entire month, though it took six more years for it to become more widely acknowledged and observed in the U.S.
"There's very little in the history books on black culture," Harrison said. "Even in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, people didn't want to hear of it."
Harrison said he played a role in gaining a wider audience toward black history in Stephens County.
He helped form a Black History Club at Stephens County High School and black history programs in the 1970s.
In 1977, Harrison said he was the first teacher in Georgia to begin recognizing significant achievements of black individuals – one a day – during February.
He broadcast the information over the intercom system at SCHS.
"Every day I'd have a different person," Harrison said, adding other systems in the state afterward adopted identical models for the month.
Harrison said that students also contributed toward the club's success.
But participation by white students in the club and in programs such as guest speakers from prominent blacks in the state was slow to gain any traction.
"They (white students) would stay at home when we had our programs," Harrison said.
In the beginning, Harrison said that the Black History Club had some 10 to 15 white students in it.
"The whites didn't want to be in the black history club because of the name," Harrison said.
As an alternative, the high school later started offering the Outreach Club, and Harrison said that in the late 1980s and early 1990s attempts were made to merge the Black History Club and Outreach Club into a single unit.
That, however, would not come about until 1996, when the two clubs were merged to become the Unity Club.
Harrison said that he was elected to the Toccoa City Commission in 1975 and served there five years before moving out of the city.
He is, so far, one of just two blacks to have served on the city commission, the late James Neal being the other.
While more diversity on local governmental boards has been slow coming, Harrison said he thinks the community is at present, in good hands.
"We have a good county and city commission at this time," Harrison said. "We do need some minority representation."
"I think diversity is a good thing," Harrison said.
"It hasn't aways been easy, especially for blacks," Harrison said.
Black history is important, Harrison said, because as blacks at one time were not free, many of their deeds were not recorded.
"They were denied that right," he said. "God has no respect of person."
"To begin with, we had nothing," Harrison said. "I think a lot (of progress) has been done," he said. "I think (there remains) a lot of progress to be made."