"Courage: The Vision to End Segregation, the Guts to Fight for It" Exhibition
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/ NYPL
This event has ended.
Few Americans realize that the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education started in South Carolina, when a country preacher named Rev. J. A. De Laine and his neighbors in Clarendon County filed a lawsuit demanding the end of separate, unequal schools for their children. The Supreme Court’s declaration in 1954 that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional initiated massive change in race relations across the country. This traveling exhibition, organized in 2004 by the Levine Museum of the New South to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, tells the story of that community—people outside the traditional power structure, without wealth and often with little classroom education—and how they worked together to begin the process that ended legal segregation of the races in America’s schools. The saga of Rev. De Laine and his community unfolds through the exhibition as visitors travel the road from Clarendon County to the Supreme Court. Personal histories, photographs, reproductions of letters and documents, interactive components (including replicas of a “black classrom” and of Rev. De Laine’s study), and artifacts help tell the story. The exhibition also introduces Judge Waties Waring, a white South Carolinian who provided counsel and assistance, and Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice who organized much of the work that become Brown v. Board of Education.
Media
Schedule
from October 02, 2009 to December 31, 2009