News: National Park Service Faces Challenge of Instituting a History Park for Reconstruction

Obama names five new national monuments, including Southern civil rights sites, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Davis, Washington Post, January 12, 2017  EXCERPTS

President Obama declared five new national monuments Thursday, ranging from a Birmingham, Ala., church bombed by segregationists to the coniferous forests of Oregon. He has now used his executive authority more than any other president to protect iconic historic, cultural and ecological sites across the country.

Three new monuments in the South, all of which have bipartisan support, exemplify Obama’s push to expand America’s shared national identity through the narrative it tells with its public lands. Two of them, in Birmingham and Anniston, Ala., were sites of violent acts perpetrated against African American children and an interracial group of civil rights activists. The third, in Beaufort, S.C., commemorates the period between the Civil War and the push for segregation in the 1890s when freed slaves worked to establish schools and communities of their own.

In a statement, Obama noted that the monuments “preserve critical chapters of our country’s history” and reflect his long-standing effort to “ensure that our national parks, monuments and public lands are fully reflective of our nation’s diverse history and culture.”

Northwestern University history professor Kate Masur, who pushed for designation along with University of California at Davis history professor Gregory Downs, said in an email that the site will illuminate “one of the most important and most misunderstood eras of our past.”

“The Reconstruction era was the nation’s first effort to grapple with slavery’s lasting impact, when millions of former slaves began forging lives in freedom, and when the nation remade the Constitution to better protect citizenship and individual rights,” she said.

Top Image:  brick church stands in the Penn Center historic site on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island. The center, the site of one of the nation's first schools for freed slaves, on Thursday was designated as a new national monument. (Bruce Smith/AP)
Bottom Image: Map of Beaufort, SC designated sites. 

Full Text located at Washington Post, January 12 , 2012