Claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too.*According to Blight’s 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, a commemoration organized by freed slaves and some white missionaries took place on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, S.C., at a former planters’ racetrack where Confederates held captured Union soldiers during the last year of the war. At least 257 prisoners died, many of disease, and were buried in unmarked graves, so black residents of Charleston decided to give them a proper burial.
TOP TEN TO MONUMENTS TO BLACK AMERICANS
Statues Commemorating Black African American Legends
Tupac Shakur – Medgar Evers – W.E.B. Dubois -Harriet Tubman
– Crispus Attucks – George Washington Carver – Joe Louis – Adam Clayton Powell Jr. – Malcolm X – Martin Luther King Memorial (NATION-NATION*Written by cganemccalla* In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.*The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades. But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but still upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine.*Brown v. Board of Education Verdict When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first black Supreme Court justice.) At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.
*Sources*History – Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.*Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, “Did Brown Matter?” The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.*Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.*Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.*Citation Information*Article Title*Brown v. Board of Education*Author*History.com Editors*Website Name*HISTORY*URL*https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of-education-of-topeka*Access Date*July 3, 2020*Publisher*A&E Television Networks*Last Updated*April 8, 2020*Original Published Date*October 27, 2009*BY* HISTORY.COM EDITORS*jEANETTE PARKER*FOUNDER-SUPERINTENDENT*TODAY’S FRESH START CHARTER SCHOOLS*4514 crenshaw bl, la90043*www.todaysfreshstart.org. inquiring minds want to know©2020*www.askdrjeanetteparker.com
