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Obama names five new national monuments, including Southern civil rights sites
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post


Washington Post, January 12, 2017
Posted: January 23rd, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama...

President Obama declared five new national monuments Thursday. Three new monuments in the South, all of which have bipartisan support, exemplify Obamas push to expand Americas 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. Obama noted that the monuments preserve critical chapters of our countrys history and reflect his long-standing effort to ensure that our national parks, monuments and public lands are fully reflective of our nations diverse history and culture. By invoking the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate the sites, Obama has now used the act more than any other president. While ... civil rights proponents had long expected the Alabama sites to be designated as national monuments, Obamas decision to establish one to Reconstruction was more surprising. Northwestern University history professor Kate Masur, who pushed for designation, [said] that the [Penn Center site in South Carolina] will illuminate one of the most important and most misunderstood eras of our past. The Reconstruction era was the nations first effort to grapple with slaverys lasting impact, when millions of former slaves began forging lives in freedom.

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