Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site and the Brown Foundation are pleased to offer the 2008-2009 program series "Race and the American Creed." The program series theme is taken from the opening gallery of the site. All events take place at Brown v. Board of Education NHS unless otherwise noted.

To request your own program series guide, ask a question about an event or make a reservation, please call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here.

Image from Separate Cinema

From Micheaux to Morrison: Literary Adaptations to Film
October 1 to October 31, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

This traveling exhibit from Separate Cinema's vintage movie posters archive, traces the changing images of African Americans in feature films. At the beginning of the 20th century, African American representations in film consisted largely of stereotypes that distorted the African American experience. The early African American independent filmmakers particularly Oscar Micheaux struggled to counter demeaning portrayals with more realistic images of African Americans in film.

Over the course of a century some of the most representative films were derived from literature by authors like Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, to name a few. The whole American culture is much richer for the efforts of filmmakers and writers from Micheaux to Morrison.

What Do You Think?

Dates on display: Permanent, with rotating topics

In the "Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education" gallery is the exhibit titled What Do You Think? The topic changes several times of year to reflect current events in society. 

This exhibit is currently featuring "School Boards, Busing and Brown: A History of Desegregation in Political Cartoons 1954-2006." 

Cartoons have long provided an outlet in society for political commentary. Even the ancient Roman catacombs contain political cartoons in the form of graffiti. Twentieth-century American newspapers became a forum for comment on the Brown v. Board of Education case and subsequent issues involving desegregation of public schools. Editorial cartooning reflects social, racial, economic, religious, as well as political issues surrounding the artist and his or her community.

A Choice of Weapons
November 1-30, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

To fight discrimination and social injustice, Gordon Parks chose the camera as his weapon. The exhibit of photos taken by the late Gordon Parks are on loan from the Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity in his boyhood home of Fort Scott, Kansas. Gordon Parks became a photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African American experience and to tell his own personal history. He developed a large following as a photographer for Life magazine for more than twenty years. By the time he was 50, he ranked among the most influential image-makers of the post-war years.

This exhibition includes fifteen original works from his photographic collection archived at the Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity at Fort Scott Community College.

Oh, Freedom Over Me
December 15, 2008 to January 30, 2009
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

Inspired by the work of the Security Administration photographers during the Depression, Matt Herron organized a team of eight photographers, called the Southern Documentary Project, in the summer of 1964 to record the rapid social change taking place in Mississippi and other parts of the South. As civil rights organizations brought in college students from outside the region to work alongside local residents in voter registration and education in Mississippi, Matt Herron, Danny Lyon, George Ballis, Dave Prince and others documented what came to be called Freedom Summer and the movement that surrounded it. Photographer Dorothea Lange served as informal advisor to the project.

A selection of these photographic images serve as the core of this engaging exhibit, which originally opened in 2004 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Freedom Summer and celebrating American voting rights and responsibilities. This traveling exhibit is from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Quilting African American Women's History: Our Challenges, Creativity, and Champions
February 16 to March 30, 2009
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

Quilting African American Women's History: Our Challenges, Creativity and Champions will introduce visitors to a collection of powerful artworks that illuminate and interpret the rich history of African American women from the beginning of this country's history through the present. While African American women have always had a past, its meanings and witnesses have been contested since the first reported arrival of three African women in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 and remain controversial scholarly subjects to this day.

This exhibit was organized by the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center of the Ohio Historical Society and curated by internationally renowned artist, historian and curator Carolyn Mazloomi, Ph. D.

Half of the quilts will be on display at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site daily from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. In partnership with Washburn University, the other half of the quilts will be on display at the Mulvane Art Museum, 17th and Jewell Streets on Washburn University's campus. Museum hours are Tuesday, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM; Wednesday thru Friday, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM; and Saturday thru Sunday, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

For more information, call the Brown Foundation at (785) 235-3939 or send an email by clicking here; or contact the Mulvane Art Museum at (785) 670-1124.

To Enjoy and Defend Our American Citizenship:   Fighting for Civil Rights in the Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act
April 3 to April 30, 2008
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

This important exhibit, presented by the Chinese Historical Society of America and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, acknowledges the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that had a dramatic effect on immigrant populations for decades afterwards. On May 6, 1882, the United States Congress passed the nation's first immigration legislation, a law to prevent people of Chinese descent from entering the country. The law would tear apart families and cut the nation's Chinese American population in half while removing their right to become U.S. citizens.

Image from Library of Congress

"I'm eight. I was born on the date of the Supreme Court decision." May 17, 1962

Desegregation and Civil Rights Political Cartoons by Herb Block
June 1 to June 30, 2009
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Free

It is said that Herb Block is a thoughtful journalist and gifted cartoonist who through his political cartoons has been thinking about "the other guy" throughout his career. For more than seventy years, cartoon after cartoon, day after day, he has chronicled the best America has to offer and the worst, from the depths of the Great Depression into a new millennium. No editorial cartoonist in American history has made a more lasting impression on the nation than Herb Block.

This exhibition celebrates the gift of the Herb Block Foundation to the Library of Congress and features a selection of original cartoons spanning the artist's remarkable career. He published his first political cartoon for a major U.S. daily newspaper shortly before the stock market crash in 1929, and drew his last in August 2001. The exhibit will feature editorial cartoons from Herb Block's series of desegregation and civil rights cartoons.